Win Production Functions for AFL Teams - 1897 to 2010

Right now I'm reading Wayne L Winston's Mathletics, a book about the use of fairly simple mathematics and sports statistics to gain insights into the results of American sports. Inspired by this book, in particular by a piece on Pythagorean Expectation which relates the season-long winning percentage of a baseball team to the total runs that it's scored and allowed, I wondered if an AFL team's win percentage could be similarly predicted by a handful of summary statistics about its own and its opponents' scoring.

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Overround as Insurance

During my first moments of consciousness this morning a thought entered my head unbidden, that "overround is the bookie's means of hiding behind imperfect probability assessments".

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A Little Behind in the Scoring

We've not had a proposition bet for a while, so here's a new one for you. We're going to pick a large number of games at random and, based on the half-time score in each, I'll pledge to bet on the team that's scored the greater number of behinds whether they be the raging favourite or the deserving underdog. It both teams have scored the same number of behinds at the main break or if the game ends in a draw, the bet is a push and neither of us need reach into our pockets. Otherwise, I collect if the team that had scored the greater number of behinds at the half goes on win, and you win if the team that had scored the lesser number of behinds at the half goes on win. Simple.

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Tipping Without Market Price Information

In a previous blog I looked at the notion of momentum and found that Richmond, St Kilda, Melbourne and Geelong all seemed to be "momentum" teams in that their likelihood of winning a game seemed to be disproportionately affected by whether they'd won or lost their previous match.

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What Price Loyalty?

The days before we lock-in a position on Round 1 can drag a little. I've spent some of this idle time in a state that's the mental equivalent of anxious pacing, in the course of which I came to be pondering what we covered in the previous blog.

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