Round 20, 2018

There’s been a clear top 2 for a while, and it’s Adelaide and Sydney, who are the first and sixth teams on the ladder. If it were one year ago, everyone would be writing Sydney off, as no team had ever come from outside the top 4 to make the Grand Final, let alone win it. But the Bulldogs changed that, and then spent this season dropping hints that it wasn’t because they had become a superstar team without anyone noticing.

So it’s all bets off, as far as I’m concerned, and current form is king.

Adelaide Crows v GWS Giants

The Crows started the year with a series of high-scoring matches, propelling them vertically up the chart. Then before you could say “premiership favourite,” they were humiliated in consecutive matches by a Spoonbowl contestant and a team that didn’t want to play finals if it meant having to beat Collingwood.

Since then, though, Adelaide have toughened up defensively while retaining most of their attacking power.

The Giants began the year as the second-ranked team and fell as injury bit. They could easily have finished outside the top 4, but managed to scrounge together enough close wins and draws to give themselves a straight shot at a Grand Final. It’s been that sort of year for GWS, with few outstanding performances and plenty of shaky ones that haven’t cost them.

Geelong Cats v Richmond Tigers

We need to zoom out a bit further for this one, because Richmond started the year ranked as a bottom 6 team. That means that not only did they have a bad 2016, but they didn’t show anything toward the end of the year that suggested a rise was on the cards, either. But rise they did, becoming a low-scoring but defensively formidable team. And in the final two games, they showed some attacking power as well.

The Cats are in a similar area, but have trod a far more meandering path, with a season that was never too good nor too bad for too long. They’ve demolished poor teams and recorded solid wins over good ones, but also had a raft of eyebrow-raising performances, such as losing to Gold Coast and squeaking home against Fremantle and North Melbourne. As such, it’s hard to draw a steady bead on the Cats, or find anything like a trend.

Sydney Swans v Essendon Bombers

Hard to say which line is more extraordinary: Essendon’s emergence from the absolute bottom to reach finals, or Sydney’s tale of a season in two parts. The Swans were never quite as out of form as their ladder position of 16th at the mid-season bye suggested, but there’s a clear inflection point here, with an early slide arrested and then dismissed as if it never happened. Since Round 7, the Swans have become once again a completely typical Sydney side, of the kind that made the Grand Final in 2014 & 2016 and won it in 2012. There’s an alluring discipline about them, with no really head-scratching performances after those first 6 rounds.

Essendon similarly took 7 rounds to really get going, notwithstanding their emotion-charged Round 1 win over the Hawks. They’ve made finals on the back of a mid-season stretch that saw them account for Geelong, West Coast, Port Adelaide, and St Kilda, during which time they also didn’t fall too short of Sydney, GWS, and Richmond. The last month has been shakier, though, with the Bombers losing comprehensively to Adelaide and the Bulldogs, while not showing terribly much against Gold Coast and Fremantle.

Port Adelaide Power vs West Coast Eagles

All year the Eagles have delivered roughly what you would expect: sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but never too far beyond expectation. They stand in stark contrast to Port Adelaide, who, when they’re on, are very, very on. When they’re off, Port are still usually competitive, but it’s that gap between their regular setting and the turbo charge switch they flip against lower sides in Gold Coast, Fremantle, Brisbane, and Carlton that has earned them the “flat track bully” moniker.

That’s probably undeserved, even though they haven’t proved it yet. The Power have been a candidate for Top Four for most of the year, holding the league’s second-best percentage, while the Eagles have spent it skirting the fringes of the Eight. If the results of other games had gone only slightly differently, Port could easily be playing a Qualifying Final this weekend with the Eagles players on holiday.

Animated!

You know I don’t believe in the whole idea of Flat Track Bullies, but god damn, Port Adelaide, you are making it difficult. The Power grew ten feet tall upon spotting a spindly, bedraggled Gold Coast, and proceeded to pound the snot out of them, while periodically stopping to flex and grin at nearby girls, and slicking back their hair with a comb. God damn you, Port Adelaide. That’s so uncool.

When Sydney curb-stomped their bottom-4 opponent, they had a little class. They were positively gentlemanly in allowing Carlton to kick 8.9, compared to the Power’s nipple-cripple of the Suns that permitted just 3.2 20.

Port Adelaide’s performance was mainly impressive for its miserliness, since scoring 135 against Gold Coast isn’t that special. It’s only 30 points more than the average team puts past the Suns. As such, the Power go shoooooting off to the right, but don’t climb much vertically. The Swans, on the other hand, see mainly vertical gains after scoring 138 against a significantly better defense.

Gold Coast finish the year as the worst-ranked team, seeing off a challenge from Fremantle.

The Cats and Tigers both had impressive wins. After some accurate goal-shooting against the Saints, Richmond are almost starting to look like a normal team, i.e. one that can score. In fact, the team that Richmond most resembles right now is Geelong, so it’s fitting that they get to Highlander it in a Qualifying Final.

I hope you appreciated my cool detachment in that previous paragraph. I’m like, sure, I write about Richmond making a QF all the time. No biggie. You can’t even tell I have my legs crossed like super tight.

And now for Melbourne. I take no joy in Melbourne. It’s a bit surprising because I was really pissed at Melbourne after the whole Jordan McMahon game thing. But no, apparently I have no more schadenfreude to give. This one sucks, Melbourne. Here is the tragedy of Melbourne in tower form:

And on Flagpole:

Is now a good time to mention that Squiggle was tipping a Swans v Adelaide Grand Final before the start of the year? I feel like yes.

Still no freaking love for the Tigers.

Last year, Squiggle had an impressive 67% hit rate in tipping finals that didn’t involve the Western Bulldogs. After including the Dogs, it was a bit less impressive, going 3-6 (33%). But 2016 was a strange year; the home (higher-placed) team has won finals regularly since 2000, going at about 72%. So you’re normally pretty safe backing them.

Finals previews to come sometime!

That was a big round of football!

Sometimes a round is full of crucial matches and they turn out to be close games, so, sure, they’re entertaining, but you don’t learn a whole lot about either team, other than that they’re evenly matched.

Then you have rounds like this one!

Adelaide firmed into a solid, erect position, thrusting firmly into the open, inviting premiership zone. That’s quite a trajectory you’ve made there, Adelaide. There’s a real cockiness about it. It came about after a graphic display against the Power, the Crows taking a liking to the wet, slippery conditions and dominating, especially the behinds (18.22 to 7.4).

Less phallically, Sydney demolished Geelong to move into that part of the chart I should really just go ahead and name THE SYDNEY AREA, because the last season they didn’t spend time there was 2010. No-one else wants to live there, Sydney. It’s really just you and whoever Ross Lyon was coaching at the time. But you keep coming back, year after year.

The week belonged to those two teams, who put a lot of space between them and the rest of the field.

But it was also terrific for Richmond! In fact, I now think Richmond is going to win the flag. This is not supported at all by squiggle. It’s more of a vibe. I’ll explain more below.

It was an interesting week if you’re on Scoring Shot Watch. Essendon’s victory over Carlton wasn’t so narrow (11.18 to 11.10), Collingwood’s over North wasn’t so great (16.15 to 7.15), and GWS really destroyed Melbourne (14.13 to 10.2). Fremantle put away Gold Coast pretty handily, too (12.18 to 10.7).

Gold Coast have had a pretty ordinary second half to the year after a promising start. So have North Melbourne, who were far more competitive a few months ago, even though they weren’t winning games.

And on the chart, Carlton and Freo became one. Think about that for a moment. It’s horrible, isn’t it. There is literally nothing good about that for anyone.

This time of year, the Season Predictor becomes less helpful, because with so few matches remaining, you can just about figure things out yourself. Also it averages out a team’s chances of winning each match, which works much better over the long-term than just three games.

But Tower of Power is always interesting! Lots of movement this week:

Most noticeable is Adelaide turning into a banner ad in the #1 spot. It would take an Adelaide-grade implosion for them to miss from here. Of course, if anyone can do an Adelaide-grade implosion, it’s Adelaide. But top spot is almost certainly theirs.

The trapdoor opened up beneath Geelong, but with games against Richmond (at Kardinia), North, and GWS, they still have a pretty good path to 2nd. And with a 1.5 win break over 5th, things would have to go horribly wrong for them to miss the top 4.

Since Geelong, GWS and Richmond play each other in the remaining three rounds, the effect of each result is magnified. So right now those three teams have a pretty even chance of finishing 2nd, and it will go to whichever of them manages to stand up.

The desolation of Port Adelaide left a lot of room for Sydney and Richmond to move into.

And the Bulldogs still have a remarkable array of plausible finishes! They have a 5% chance or better in every slot from 4th (where Geelong lose a lot) to 11th.

On Flagpole, it’s good night to the Hawks:

And otherwise the usual story. Adelaide are surrounded by premiership cups on the main chart; they are going to be 1st.

Now: Why Richmond will win the flag!

Obviously I’m 100% only writing this because I’m a Richmond supporter. Squiggle doesn’t foresee good things for Richmond in the finals. But this section applies to other teams as well.

It’s all about the killer bye. The bye is bad, for mysterious reasons, and has always been bad, going back decades. More specifically, it’s bad for teams that had a bye last week when their opponent didn’t. There is plenty of data on this: Those teams underperform.

The only mystery has been why the bye becomes good when you get one thanks to a qualifying final victory. In those cases, the bye works like it’s supposed to, and they win repeatedly and reliably.

Until last year, when we had a pre-finals bye for the first time, and after winning Qualifying Finals, Geelong and GWS both lost. Instead, the Bulldogs won the flag from 7th. Now we all know that had never been done before, which is remarkable enough in itself. But what makes it amazing, and a little suspicious, is that no-one came close before.

If the Final Eight system offers a reasonable chance for 7th to win the flag, you would expect, at some point this century, a team to have at least made the Grand Final from 5th or 6th. Not win the premiership; just make the GF. But nope.

For 16 years, we had a near-perfect statistical distribution where the team that finished 1st was most likely to make the GF and win the flag, then the team that finished 2nd was, then 3rd, and then 4th could make the GF sometimes but never win the flag. And 5th-8th never made the GF.

Then in 2016, 7th wins the flag!

It may well be that 2016 was just one of those years, and the Bulldogs one of those teams, and it’ll never happen again. But another explanation is that this answers the mystery of why the Qualifying Final winner bye was good: It was only because it came right at the very end of the year, when all teams were exhausted, which caused the restorative benefits to outweigh the usual negative effect. But since the AFL introduced a pre-finals bye last year, that benefit vanished, and all that’s left is the usual killer bye, where teams that had a week off do worse against teams that didn’t.

This makes me far less certain that it’s necessary to (a) finish top 4 and (b) win a qualifying final to take out the premiership. The fact that the Bulldogs did it last year makes it less certain, and the possibility that it’s due to the pre-finals bye makes it doubly uncertain. It may even be bad to finish top 4 and win a qualifying final.

If so, it’s a far more open race to the flag than anyone thinks. A team like Sydney, in fine form but up against it to make the top 4, has a perfect run to the flag. A team like Richmond, who might finish 4th but be unable to beat 1st in a Qualifying Final, has a much better shot at redemption than history would suggest. And a team like the Bulldogs, or Essendon, who in previous years would be dismissed as just making up the numbers, can actually go all the way if only they find form at the right time.

The only certainty of the finals campaign this year may be that the form team wins no matter where they placed on the ladder.

That aside, the other reason why I think Richmond will win the flag is that statistical analysis like squiggle is only about what’s most likely to happen. Unlikely things happen all the time. They happen all the time in football. I’ve followed the Tigers my whole life and I wasn’t paying much attention to football the last time we were anything like a flag threat, so I don’t want to spoil this one with an over-reliance on what stats say usually tends to happen. I’m going to roll with the fact that anything might.

Discuss on BigFooty!

Honestly, Squiggle is no good this week. It was one of the greatest rounds of football in history; I can’t add anything to it with charts.

That’s the good stuff. Miracles happening right in front of your face.

But since we’re here:

Animated!

A good week for the Cats, who belted Carlton while the Crows, Swans, and Power struggled. It was just a little spoiled by the fact that Adelaide’s last-gasp draw against Collingwood was no good to the Crows for anything other than pride and finishing above Geelong, since now their percentage matters again. Assuming no more draws, that is. Of course, three weeks ago I said, “assuming no more draws,” and there were immediately two more. Teams are drawing all over the place. So who knows.

These 11-goal-wins-over-bad-teams are the kinds of games that squiggle rates and humans don’t. They’re easy to overlook, because you expect the better team to win comfortably. But it’s worth taking notice when the margin is 70-odd instead of 30.

It’s also worth looking at scoring shots. This year I’ve been trialling a new algorithm in the background that will probably take over from the venerable ISTATE-91:12 in powering squiggle next year. One of the main differences is that it pays attention to scoring shots, since teams don’t tend to remain unusually accurate (or inaccurate) for very long. Most weeks it doesn’t make a huge difference, but this week Squiggle 2.0 rates GWS much higher for their 13.20 to Fremantle’s 13.8, as well as Richmond for defeating Gold Coast 14.14 to 10.5. Geelong’s victory over Carlton becomes even more emphatic (18.15 to 8.10), and Essendon (13.19) look a lot more competitive against the Bulldogs (19.13). Also St Kilda get a technical victory against Port (8.13 to 9.9), as do Collingwood over Adelaide (15.13 to 16.7).

Meanwhile, after Adelaide’s slide, Sydney are now rated the #1 form team! Just. That’s based on their strength in home & away matches; finals will be a little different, both because Sydney are unlikely to finish high enough to get home finals, and because they’re more of a defensive specialist than most premiership teams.

A bit of separation has emerged after the top 2, with Adelaide and Geelong likely to claim those spots. Then Port, GWS, and Richmond form a tier, for the moment, being the most likely to take out 3rd to 5th. Sydney are the most likely to jump up alongside them.

On the Tower, the long, snake-like tendrils of Hawthorn are creeping upward:

That’s a pretty significant chance of a Hawks finals campaign for a team that’s spent most of the season eyeing off 17th.

But there’s a bit of a hard line below that, formed by Collingwood. Basically if you’re better than Collingwood, you might play finals, but if you’re worse than Collingwood, you can’t. Also you can’t if you’re Collingwood.

North’s continuation of their long-running curb stomp over Melbourne had the unfortunate side-effect of making a Round 23 SpoonBowl vs Brisbane less likely. But we can always hope.

This week’s adjusted Flagpole has the Swans slip below the Cats! On original Flagpole, as seen on https://live.squiggle.com.au, Sydney are still a clear 2nd. So I’m not sure about that. But we’ll go with it for now:

Discuss on BigFooty!