What's More Important: Who You Play or Where You Play Them?

The benefits of playing at home have been extensively investigated both here on MAFL for Australian Rules football and more generally within the sports prediction community for this and other sports. Put simply, teams that play at home win more often and score more points than you'd otherwise expect them to after adjusting for the quality of the opponents they face.

Click to read more ...

Revisiting Home Ground Advantage

This week I've been part of a Twitter conversation about Home Ground Advantage in the AFL, a trending topic because of the shift from Football Park to Adelaide Oval for the home games of Adelaide and Port Adelaide in the 2014 season.

Click to read more ...

MARS Rating Changes and Scoring Percentages: 1897-2013

The idea for this blog sprang from some correspondence with Friend of MAFL, Michael, so let me start by thanking him for being the inspiration. Michael was interested in exploring the relationship between team performances and the resulting change in their MARS Ratings across a season, which I'll explore here by charting, for each team and every season, the for-and-against percentage they achieved in all games including Finals, and the change in their MARS Rating per game during that same season.

Click to read more ...

Another View of All-Time AFL Team MARS Ratings Post the 2013 Season

Recently I'd been noticing some traffic to the site from the Big Footy website where the Forum members had been discussing the relative strengths of Bulldogs teams across VFL/AFL history. That, coupled with my continuing desire to become more proficient in the ggplot2 R package of Hadley Wickham, dragged me out of my off-season blog malaise to perform the analyses underpinning this current posting.

Click to read more ...

Building Your Own Team Rating System

Just before the 2nd Round of 2008 I created MAFL's Team Ratings System, MARS, never suspecting that I'd still be writing about it 5 years later. At the time, I described MARS in the newsletter for that week in a document still available from the Newsletters 2005-2008 section section of this website (it's linked under the "MAFL The Early Years" menu item in the navigation bar on the right of screen). Since then, MARS, as much to my surprise as I think to anyone's, has been a key input to the Line Funds that have operated in each of the ensuing years.

Click to read more ...