Eight Teams Out - Redux

With the finals now on for young and old, there is so much 'he-said, she-said' on the air now as to how they will play out. With that in mind, a short review of the past is in order to see who has the mental edge going in.

Re-run the games that mattered.

Top 8 Fixture - click to enlarge

With no disrespect to the bottom 8 teams, lets chuck out any games the top 8 have played against them, and re-work the season into games that only those in the top 8 played. This then gives all the results as per the (clickable) table at right.

This reduces the games of significance down to 39, with a few teams having played other top 8 teams 11 times, and others as little as 8 games. This is purely a function of the AFL draw and its obvious problem of not being able to schedule all teams to play each other home and away.



Re-work the ladder to reflect head-to-head form.
The current 8 lists out as below (PS: AFL, when did Geelong become Geelong Cats...?);

Courtesy: AFL website

Re-working the 8 to count only those games played amongst themselves yields the below;

Adjusted 8: only games between top 8 finishers

The above is an interesting shift in thinking about the 8, with a boost to Essendon and Sydney over Carlton, West Coast and St. Kilda.

Re-work that to compensate for 'games played'.
The above though is still not a fair representation as there is an imbalance in the games played (i.e. Essendon have had 4 wins from 11 tries vs. West coast 3 wins from 8 opportunities). To re-dress that, we pull out the old AFL favourite 'match ratio'. This also boosts Sydney's stocks, as well as reinforcing that Carlton and St. Kilda have little form against other top 8 teams.

Adjusted 8: only games between top 8 finishers, factoring for 'match ratio'

But, which ever way you cut it... the premiership is still Collingwood's to lose, with the only true outside chances to be the Cats and the Hawks. You should also be wary of West Coast and Sydney, as if they get a home final, they could go further than most would credit.

In the next day or so, I will look at the form of each team in the 8 on a head-to-head basis.