When you come off a good win, you don’t just want to analyze how great you were compared to the other team; you want to see how great you were compared to ALL the other teams.
Sadly, it’s hard to establish objectively how much better (or worse) Richmond’s defeat of Hawthorn was to Collingwood’s thumping of St Kilda, for example, or any of the round’s other games.
Until now! Squiggle now offers an algorithmic ranking of who had the best round. Using data from the aggregate Projected Ladder, which brings together the predictions of many different excellent AFL prediction models, this determines how the weekend’s results impacted each team, by comparing how their predicted ladder finishes changed.
This is all based on pre-round expectations, so an upset win can be hugely meaningful for a team, radically improving its prospects of finishing higher on the ladder. Equally, a shock loss can be catastrophic, as the cold-hearted computer models begin shaving down its finals chances.
The importance of “eight-point games” is clearly visible, too, where teams that defeat an opponent competing for the same ladder spots are recognized both for advancing their own position and damaging their competitor’s.
To have an outstanding weekend outside of “eight-point games,” teams need to rely on other results falling fortuitously, so that teams around them lose, while teams too far above or below to matter win.
The current algorithm is a bit experimental, since it applies a weighting to decide the relative importance of changes in predicted ranks vs wins vs percentage. It also applies its own ideas in determining how much to scale these based on the predicted “closeness” of teams, and therefore who is competing with whom for which spots. So it’s currently in beta.
But I think it offers a pretty good map of the round, allowing a peek into the changing fortunes of each team, as prognosticated by the internet’s finest models.