Opening Round, 2025

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):