Does an Extra Day's Rest Matter in the Home and Away Season?

Whenever the draw for a new season is revealed there's much discussion about the teams that face one another only once, about which teams need to travel interstate more than others, and about which teams are asked to play successive games with fewer days rest. There is in the discussion an implicit assumption that more days rest is better than fewer days rest but, to my knowledge, this is never supported by empirical analysis. It is, like much of the discussion about football, considered axiomatic. In this blog we'll assess how reasonable that assumption is.

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Persistence in Team MARS Ratings

Over the course of the last two blogs we've investigated the season-to-season correlations in team winning percentages and in team scoring behaviour. In this blog we'll look, far more briefly, at the season-to-season correlations in team MARS Ratings.

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Defensive and Offensive Abilities : Do They Persist Across Seasons?

In the previous blog we reviewed the relationship between teams' winning percentages in one season and their winning percentages in subsequent seasons. We found that the relationship was moderate to strong from one season to the next and then tapered off fairly quickly over the course of the next couple of seasons so that, by the time a season was three years distant, it told us relatively little about a team's likely winning percentage. There is, of course, an inextricable link between winning and scoring, and in this blog we'll investigate the temporal relationships in teams' scoring in much the same way as we investigated the temporal relationships in teams' winning in that previous blog.

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What Do Seasons Past Tell Us About Seasons Present?

I've looked before at the consistency in the winning records of teams across seasons but I've not previously reported the results in any great detail. For today's blog I've stitched together the end of season home-and-away ladders for every year from 1897 to 2012, which has allowed me to create a complete time series of the performances for every team that's ever played.

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How Many Quarters Will the Home Team Win?

In this last of a series of posts on creating estimates for teams' chances of winning portions of an AFL game I'll be comparing a statistical model of the Home Team's probability of winning 0, 1, 2, 3 or all 4 quarters with the heuristically-derived model used in the most-recent post.

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