2012 MARS, Colley, Massey and ODM Ratings After Round 15

Collingwood, despite losing convincingly to the Blues and dropping 3.4 Rating Points (RPs) in the process, remain in second on MARS Ratings, but now find themselves more than 10 RPs behind the Hawks.

After the Pies there's a gap of about 4 RPs to an unlikely trio of birds and cats - West Coast, Sydney and Geelong - all within a single RP of one another. Then follows five more teams rated above 1,000, then Richmond who is nearly so. So, we have 10, and almost 11, teams Rated above average.

The gap between the team rated 4th (Sydney) and that rated 15th (Port Adelaide) now stands at 54.1 RPs, the largest it's been all season, the culmination of a trend starting from the end of Round 10 when the gap was over 13 RPs smaller.

Looking just a little further back, since the end of Round 9, Hawthorn and Sydney have been the form teams on MARS Ratings, accumulating over 15 RPs and 10 RPs respectively on the back of 5 straight victories each in the competition.

Brisbane, Adelaide and St Kilda have been more moderate net gainers, the Saints despite winning only 2 of their last 5 games, grabbing between about 4 and 6 RPs each. Five more teams have enjoyed lesser RP gains, and five more have shed between a little over zero and a little over 4 RPs.

That leaves only the Dogs, Carlton and the Gold Coast to talk about, all having shed at least 7 RPs and each having won no more than one of its past five encounters - in the Suns' case, none at all.

The average RP exchange between teams this week was 2.3 RPs per team per game, a little higher than the all-season average of 2.2 RPs per team per game, but a little lower than the 2.5 RPs per team per game recorded in Round 14.

So far this season, the greatest single-round average RP swap was 3.3 RPs per team per game back in Round 7, and the lowest single-roiund average was 1.0 RPs per team per game in Round 5.

As yet another indicator of the highly predictable nature of results this season, the current average of 2.2 RPs per team per game compares with a figure of 2.6 RPs per team per game across the entire home-and-away season of 2011.

In total, MARS re-ranked five teams on the basis of this week's results, the fewest re-rankings of any of our Rating Systems. Massey re-ranked most, shuffling nine teams, three of them (Adelaide, Carlton and St Kilda) up by two spots or more, and two of them (Essendon and Richmond) down by two spots or more.

Colley was next most active, re-ranking 8 teams, though only two of them by multiple places. It moved Carlton back up from 11th to 9th and, curiously perhaps, Hawthorn, despite a thumping win over the Giants, down from 3rd to 5th. Remember though that Colley takes no notice of victory margins and so, in essence, was merely more impressed by the Swans' win over the Lions, and the Eagles' win over the Roos, than it was by the Hawks' win over the lowly Giants.

ODM meantime re-ranked just 6 teams, including 2-spot rises for Adelaide and St Kilda, and 2-spot falls for Collingwood and Essendon.

All these moves have left the Ratings Systems of most notably differing opinions about six teams: 

• Adelaide - rated 9th by MARS and 2nd by Colley
• St Kilda - rated 12th by Colley and 5th by Massey and ODM
• Collingwood - rated 7th by ODM, 6th by Massey, 2nd by MARS, and 1st by Colley
• Geelong - rated 10th by Massey and ODM, and 5th by MARS
• Fremantle - rated 12th by Massey and MARS, and 8th by Colley
• Hawthorn - rated 5th by Colley, and 1st by Massey, ODM and MARS

Had we simply selected the higher-rated team in every contest in Round 15, blithely ignoring home team status, all four Rating Systems would have correctly tipped seven of the week's nine winners. A similar strategy, pursued from the start of Round 5, would have produced the following accuracy rates: 

• MARS 73.3%
• Colley 72.2%
• ODM 71.1%
• Massey 70.0%

(To provide a little context for these numbers, favourites have won 75.6% of the contests since the start of Round 5.)