Category: Squiggle

I don’t know why I do this. Seriously. Six games to open the round and they’re all upsets except one that just falls short, and which one is that? RICHMOND. This is like going home to visit your family for the holidays and you decide to go on a long walk by yourself and then come back to find that everyone has burned to death except that one cousin you hate. And then you have to graph it.

So, I dunno, a bunch of bullshit happened and some teams won and some lost. See for yourself:

I missed the first quarter of the Richmond game, by the way. I only caught the last three, where the Bulldogs slowly but relentlessly mowed us down. That was great.

Speaking of unbelievable bullshit, North Melbourne, the 15th most likely team to make the Final Eight according to the bookies, outscored flag favourite Adelaide 64 to 0 in the first quarter. After the scientists at CERN get done analysing the god particle thing I would like them to take a look at that, because I need a rational explanation.

In light of that game, St Kilda beating GWS doesn’t even seem that weird. I mean, of course they did. Why not? Why not win by a THOUSAND points and make it really interesting. But the Saints did it in style, and shifted into that pack of teams that look like genuine finals challengers.

Collingwood again failed to decide if they’re a bad team or an okay one and stick to it for more than one week in a row. That was a fine win for Carlton, though, making it a great fortnight for the Blues after dispatching Sydney last week.

The Swans were no surprise this week, which was a surprise. Also sticking to the script were Melbourne and Hawthorn, who were expected to be evenly matched. Although of course Squiggle tipped Melbourne by 3pts when it should have known that that’s Hawthorn’s favourite margin to win by.

Gold Coast are suggesting a pattern, too, with a distinctive upward trend this year as they’ve improved their attack. Of course, there are no patterns, because football is really random noise designed to break your heart. But that’s what it looks like.

Carlton have shifted out of the bottom 2, with Squiggle marking down Essendon pretty harshly for the final quarter against Fremantle.

It’s all pretty even, though, which as I’ve mentioned before, isn’t really that shocking, as it’s at least halfway explained by the fact that Gold Coast and GWS no longer have under-16s teams. There were plenty of seasons like this pre-2011. It’s also still the first part of the year, when everyone’s optimistic and trying hard, as opposed to later, when they’ve sacked the coach and are playing kids with an eye on the next five year plan and losing every week.

Speaking of Richmond, they remain an excellent chance of losing an Elimination Final, or possibly falling short in the final rounds and finishing 9th. So that’s really promising. You know, it’s not even the fact that we lost to the Bulldogs, because we were closer than I expected, it’s just the way it went down. Like a horror movie where the serial killer is shambling along the corridor behind the girl and she’s trying all the door handles and you’re just like RUN YOU GORMLESS MORON and it seems like forever before the killer reaches her and raises his arm and says, “Deliberate out of bounds.”

Flagpole! North gets a rise out of smacking Adelaide, as does Gold Coast for punishing the Cats.

Discuss on BigFooty!

The notable thing about GWS is how bad they used to be. This is maybe best to see on a plot of all squiggles from 2000-2017:

With GWS highlighted:

GWS were worse than any other team this century. And they were that bad for a long time. Only Melbourne are really comparable.

Then they got better!

View post on imgur.com

Lots of validation this week for the squiggle theory that teams don’t suddenly get a lot better or worse very often, with Richmond, Fremantle, and Essendon looking more like their owners put them up on blocks and spent the summer tinkering with the engine, rather than going out and buying a new car.

But not Sydney! Sydney are the strange one: a team that looked like a sports car throughout 2016 but then seem to have traded in for my old “fire engine red” 1978 Gemini.

The 2017 Sydney Swans

Animated squiggling:

The Hawks crashed again, but the only surprise there was how bad it was; we knew they were wobbling toward the middle of the road with the bumper hanging off, but we didn’t know there was a tram coming the other way. A number 96 tram, bound for St Kilda, this week.

But it was all good for Adelaide, who cruised past the Tigers while Geelong lost to the Pies and GWS barely outlasted the Bulldogs.

The Bulldogs currently look locked in a battle for a Top 4 spot with Port Adelaide, who also had a good week. In fact, the Power may well have a real vehicle here, as they haven’t had a bad squiggle all year, so could wind up leaving the Cats and Dogs to fight for 4th. But for now, it’s looking like this:

Or in animated form:

Tons of uncertainty through the middle, with many teams capable of finishing all over the place.

It’s worth noting how bad Brisbane are. They were terrible late last year and have been consistently terrible all this year. I keep hearing talk about how improved they are and I don’t get it. Only a handful of teams in the last 10 years have had a sub-40 Defence rating in the squiggle, including the expansion clubs, and Brisbane is just camping out there. It’s pretty hard to find wins when you can’t stop the opposition from scoring.

And for all the talk of the Tigers’ new attacking game style, they’re still a defensive team. A couple of games in the wet haven’t helped, but there isn’t much evidence that they can score well against good opposition.

So after 6 rounds we have:

• Teams with improved 2017 models: Port Adelaide, Richmond, Adelaide, Gold Coast, Essendon, Fremantle, St Kilda (only because of their last game), Geelong (being generous).
• Teams still driving their 2016 models: Brisbane, West Coast, GWS, Collingwood, North Melbourne, Melbourne, Carlton, Western Bulldogs (being generous).
• Teams still driving their 2016 models and there’s this weird noise whenever you brake that you should have had checked out months ago and now there’s smoke coming out: Hawthorn, Sydney.

Flagpole! Squiggle hasn’t rated the Tigers like their 5-0 start would suggest, but the Crows’ 76-point win was still enough for yet another week of “yay Adelaide.”

There was a question earlier about how Sydney can rated so highly when they face a challenge to even make finals. And the answer is yes, this is more or less an “if they make finals, how will they go” rating. More specifically, it’s an algorithm that survived a deathmatch against tens of thousands of other algorithms in a competition to rank the eventual premier highly during the season. It hasn’t been trained to care about teams lower down the pecking order, so long as they’re not bumping out the eventual premier. And it’s completely ignorant of how likely the team is to make finals and whether they get home games or double chances if/when they get there.

I can probably improve this now that squiggle is actually running season simulations, but for the moment, it’s a “premiership form” rating, where it rates highly teams who are most delivering results similar to those of premiers from the last 20 or 30 years.

Discuss on BigFooty!

A good week for the top 3 in Adelaide, GWS and Geelong, who opened up a fair gap on the rest:

Squiggle also appreciated Port Adelaide pounding the snot out of Carlton to the tune of 90 points.

The rest of the top 7 slid, although for different reasons: The Western Bulldogs got the job done against Brisbane, but not very well; Sydney fell to GWS, which was expected, but not by that much; and West Coast were thumped in a game they were expected to win against the Hawks.

That was a great result for Hawthorn, as a bunch of mid-table teams also went nowhere. So while a week ago they were staring into the abyss, now they’re back in the fight, one of those teams who might plausibly finish in a range of different spots, because everyone’s pretty evenly matched:

Horrible for Collingwood, though, who are this week’s team to most resemble the passage of digested food through a lower intestine.

The Tower is very suggestive of a top 3 of Adelaide, GWS, and Geelong. The bottom 2 is looking a lot like Carlton and Brisbane. Beyond that, though, things get less certain. From 9th down to 16th, the tower slices are nearly vertical, with plenty of teams capable of finishing in each slot.

In fact, the ladder predictor has 7 teams finishing with 9 wins, which would be really something:

It’s an inflection point this week, with Richmond expected to start dropping games and Sydney expected to start collecting them. If that doesn’t happen – if Richmond even run it close against the Crows in Adelaide, or Sydney don’t win by much against Carlton – they will move on the squiggle.

Essendon had a good week, beating Collingwood in the ANZAC game, and Brisbane showed something against the Bulldogs, albeit off the back of Inside 50 conversation rates so eerily good that they were probably a statistical fluke.

The Tigers did it again this week, being almost exactly two goals better than expected, which, again, is good but not great. As a result, squiggle is showing a huge disparity between Richmond’s likelihood of making finals (very good) and winning the flag (no chance):

I’m reading “The Enchanted Wood” to my kids at the moment. In the middle of the Faraway Tree, Moon-Face has a slippery-dip that goes all the way down the inside the tree, which Joe, Beth, and Frannie ride down on cushions. Just like Hawthorn! Wheee!

But as you can tell from the flood of Richmond supporters entering this thread, the big story this week wasn’t that Hawthorn are heading for the soft moss outside the trapdoor at the bottom of the tree, nor that Geelong might actually win the flag this year, and not even that Nathan Buckley is nearing completion of his master plan to dismember one of the greatest teams in modern football. No! IT’S THAT THE TIGERS ARE 4-0.

Like every Richmond fan, I’ve spent the past 48 hours scouring the internet for anyone prepared to say we’re a premiership threat and mashing the LIKE button. I was hoping Squiggle would deliver for me here, but no, it’s still pretty tepid on the Tigers. It is tipping them to make finals for the first time, but only just, and it thinks the next month promises a return to reality, with a series of tough games.

So obviously Squiggle has SERIOUS FLAWS.

Actually, it’s for two reasons. Firstly, Squiggle doesn’t think teams get a lot better or worse in a hurry. It’s pretty conservative in this regard, because historically, teams really don’t get a lot better or worse in a hurry very often. As shocking as it is to see Hawthorn suddenly coughing up consecutive 86-point defeats, this is a team that started exhibiting symptoms of the same disease that claimed Fremantle the year before: pinching a bunch of close games and tailing off into the finals. In 2015 I wrote that Fremantle were the luckiest minor premier ever; in 2016 I wrote that in a fair universe, Hawthorn would have finished 6th, not 3rd. Most of the time, just like when Joe visits the Land of Toys and is turned into a clockwork clown, teams start hinting at what they’re becoming before they actually become it.

And the Tigers were pretty bad last year, finishing 13th with 8 wins, a percentage of 79.5, and no excuses like terrible injuries or a run of close losses. They were just bad. Admittedly, they made finals three years in a row before that, but in the worst possible way you can make finals three years in a row: the way where you don’t win any. This isn’t a premiership contender bouncing back from one dud season.

Secondly, while the Tigers have outperformed Squiggle expectations in all four matches, they’ve only done so by a few goals each time. You can move rapidly on Squiggle if you deliver (or receive) an unexpected thrashing, but the Tigers haven’t done that. They’ve just been a bit better.

So Richmond is rated a middle-ish team with four wins in the bank. Like North Melbourne last year, that looks like a club that will make finals, but not do much more. So, you know, Richmond 2013-15.

And that means that, like last year, there’s a gap between the best seven (Adelaide, GWS, Geelong, Bulldogs, West Coast, Port Adelaide, Sydney) and the rest. Just as the Tigers haven’t risen far because they’ve haven’t delivered a thrashing, Sydney haven’t fallen far because they haven’t received one. So while the Swans’ 0-4 start has virtually destroyed their hopes of a Top 4 finish, they’re probably still a very good team.

Geelong is this week’s big winner, by opening up their Top 2 chances. This is a lot more graphic in Tower of Power form:

Especially if you imagine a little regurge sound. Or produce one involuntarily. Of course, it’s possible that Hawthorn is going full Fremantle 2016 and the Cats aren’t that great; the Hawks are just that bad. After all, even Gold Coast can beat the Hawks by 86 points. But 134-48 is still impressive, particularly the 48 part, where they restrict an opposition to six goals.

It was a bad week for Brisbane, who look increasingly lonely as most of last year’s bottom 6 show improvement (Richmond, Fremantle, Gold Coast, Essendon). I mean, not Hawthorn-bad. Relative to Hawthorn, Brisbane’s week was like visiting the Land of Birthdays, where you get a wish granted with every slice of cake you eat. But still not great.

Flagpole!

Live squiggle!

Animated!

So… Hawthorn. This isn’t an easy conversation. You’ve been there for me since I started posting squiggle stuff on BigFooty. You camped out among the premiership cups for months on end. You were a pleasure to watch and easy to predict.

It’s even easy to identify the moment it all went wrong for Hawthorn: Round 6, April 30, 2016, 4:35pm. That was when the Hawks, travelling at 4 wins and 1 loss after a series of narrow escapes, ran into GWS and started watching footballs flying over their heads. They lost by 75 points. It was the beginning of the end because if there was one thing the Hawks made clear during their period of dominance, it was that good teams don’t get thrashed.

Thrashings are very indicative. Squiggle pays a lot of attention to them, even more than wins. Very good teams don’t receive them, under any circumstances, not even when nothing’s going right. They cough up close losses but not thrashings. And they belt bad teams.

So after copping an 86-point belting from the Suns, the Hawks take the big plunge on the squiggle, while Gold Coast leap toward the middle of the pack:

Adelaide and GWS did what was expected, while Sydney had another bad week — again, not because their performance was so terrible, but because when you can only afford to lose 5 or 6 games for the year to make the top 4, it’s not great to accumulate three of them before your first win. They’re still rated the third-best team, but they probably need to go 16-3 from here, and that’s a huge ask.

A good week for the Cats, mainly because Sydney and the Bulldogs’ troubles freed up some breathing space in the top 4. Also good for Collingwood, who banked a win that few would have counted on, and stole ground from top-8 competitors in Hawthorn, Melbourne, and North.

Carlton and Essendon take a step to the right, mainly because of a heavily rain-affected game. But Fremantle overtake both after beating the Bulldogs.

The Tigers are now 3-0, but squiggle isn’t too excited yet. They’re a genuine finals chance, currently predicted to miss out on percentage only, but their results have been only mildly better than expectation. To really move, they need to belt Brisbane next week.

Flagpole! Pretty much business as usual here:

 

Not as much dramatic squiggling this week, with most results falling somewhere around expectations. But a great one to be a Port Adelaide fan!

Port had the best week by solidifying their finals’ claims in an 89-point hammering of Fremantle. As a result, the top 7 is already LOCKED IN:

I may be going early on that. That isn’t really a sure thing. But right now there are seven teams who will probably be playing finals, plus a whole mess of teams who might.

The other top 6 teams – Adelaide, the Bulldogs, GWS, Sydney, and West Coast – also had pretty good weeks, or least not terrible ones. But that’s the problem: they all did. So no-one stole a break.

The Crows, for example, would be very happy with their win over the Hawks, but even though GWS’s 102-point demolition of Gold Coast proved that Adelaide’s Round 1 victory really meant something, so too did it confirm that the Giants are a serious obstacle to the flag. So it’s a good news/bad news situation.

The Swans and Cats are an interesting pair. You would probably rather be Sydney, who put up a good fight against the Bulldogs despite a raft of injuries. But the fact that Geelong are now 2-0 while Sydney are 0-2 is starting to bite. There isn’t usually much room for error at the top of the ladder, so although Sydney are rated the better team, the question becomes whether they’re so much better that they can overtake the Cats after giving them a 2-win head start.

North Melbourne had about as good a week as you can have when you lose by one point. And Gold Coast had about as good a week as you can have when you lose by 102, because Fremantle and Brisbane showed they’re bad enough to compete for the spoon, and Carlton doesn’t look like breaking out of the bottom 4, either.

Not much action on Flagpole this week, since it already loved Adelaide, and expected nothing less from them than what they delivered. But a handy bump for the Giants, Bulldogs, and Port.

For more: Live squiggle! – Squiggle dials!

What’s better than beating the premiership favourite by 56 points? Doing it while the second premiership favourite goes down in a screaming heap at home to Port Adelaide!

Last year, the Squiggle had a torrid love affair with the Crows, who offered a blistering attack of the kind the squiggle can’t resist, and then, just when it seemed like all sizzle and no steak, and the squiggle’s friends were like, “He’s no good for you, he can’t be trusted, and he rides a motorcycle,” began delivering solid defensive efforts as well. Adelaide were Squiggle’s Flagpole pick from mid-season right up until Round 23, when a catastrophic home loss to West Coast dumped them from 2nd to 5th. And two finals later, they were gone.

But now they’re back! And doing the exact same thing, lifting off vertically, by scoring more than expected while holding their opponent in check.

Adelaide had the best week, but Port’s was also huge. Sure, Sydney have a history of starting the season slowly, but they were still widely expected to account for the Power, and didn’t. As a result, Port bounced right up into Top 8 territory:

There are four teams there all on 11 predicted wins from 8th to 11th, so that will change very easily.

Then there’s Essendon, who answered the question, “So will the Bombers be much better this season?” with, “For now, yes!”

West Coast, Melbourne, and Richmond also had great weeks. In particular, they kicked big scores, even moreso than the rest of the competition. That’s a bit of a Round 1 trend; at least, if two years including this one can make a trend. Last year it faded away, with average scores winding up only a little above the long-term average.

Gold Coast’s week was the worst, despite the big comeback, since they dropped a game to the wooden spoon favourite and probably had the most disappointing result of the bottom 6. But Hawthorn’s was pretty bad, too.

Flagpole! This is a premier predictor that rates performances based on how similar they are to those from past premiership-winning teams. In practice, this mostly means that it cares more about attack than defense, since attacking teams have won a lot of flags over that period, while defensive teams have been coached by Ross Lyon.

Live squiggle!

P.S. Sorry for the graphical glitchiness that makes GWS and Adelaide’s squiggle lines a bit thin this week. Will be better next week.

Discuss on BigFooty!