;)
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 7:03PM Anyone who's ever tipped sporting outcomes knows the frustration of the untippable team, the team that win when they're supposed to lose, and lose when they're supposed to win. With that idea in mind, which team's results, I wondered, have been the most difficult to predict across the history of the VFL/AFL.
Friday, April 19, 2013 at 10:10PM As we look at MARS Ratings across the expanse of VFL/AFL history, one thing we might want to consider is whether the value of a Rating Point has remained stable across those 13 decades. I've assumed, implicitly, that this is the case in the interpretations I've made of recent analyses, for example about the game's greatest upsets, but there's no a priori reason for this to be the case.
Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 8:55PM In this blog, the next is a series in which I've been exploring the all-time MARS Ratings I created for every game from the start of 1897 to the end of the 2012 season, I'll be looking at how well each team has performed depending on the relative strength of its opponent, as measured by their MARS Rating. So, for example, we'll consider how well Collingwood tends to do when playing a team it is assessed as being much stronger than, a little stronger than, about as capable as, and so on.
Monday, April 8, 2013 at 9:50PM The Suns' victory over the Saints in the first round of the 2013 season was heralded as an "upset win" for the Suns and one of the greatest in their short history. Undoubtedly their win was unexpected, but even the bookmakers rated the Suns as only $3.75 chances, so it was hardly a Halley's comet-like occurrence.
Saturday, April 6, 2013 at 10:54PM In the previous blog on the topic of all-time MARS Ratings I explained the process I used to derive team Ratings across history and then identified those teams that had achieved the highest (Essendon) and lowest (Fitzroy) MARS Ratings ever. We know then which teams have burned brightest - and which flickered dimmest - across VFL/AFL history. In this blog I want to explore more extended bursts of talent or apparent lack of it.
