Certified Legendary Thread Race for the flag, in squiggly lines

[Beer n Skittles]

I haven't heard that that much, I have heard claims that Carlton are the most boundary hugging side in the league.

Well it only gets mentioned in every single pre-game commentary segment since Malthouse became coach. Google 'Malthouse defence-orientated' and you'll get a dozen articles, even though 'orientated' isn't a proper word.

 

[Inferno]

Final Siren,

You've got a bit of Squiggle Cola going on. In round 8 Hawthorn beat Sydney yet Sydney are credited with the win on the ladder??? :-/

Home grand advantage for Geelong seems to be messed up as well.

We get a home ground advantage for our matches at the MCG when we shouldn't e.g. in Hawthorn vs. Geelong when the Hawks are the home team they're forecast to win 111-76, but only 99-88 when Geelong are the home team despite both matches being at the same ground. Same deal vs. Collingwood.

 

[Janus]

The wins aren't counted as 'wins'. You were earn points based on how well you perform. So Swans get 0.34 points this takes their total from 5.39 rounded to 5 so 5 wins, goes up to 5.75 and rounds up to 6 wins.

It's based on your opponent. A close win to a top 4 team is worth more than a medium win against Melb/St K

Hope that makes sense.

This makes sense - but how do you explain this? Fiddling around with the team positions, the predictor says that Port wins against Fremantle away 88-82, for .58 wins. Whereas Sydney beats Essendon by 35 points at home and it's credited .87 wins. Some criminal underrating of Fremantle or overrating of Essendon going on.

 

[KillaKanga]

This makes sense - but how do you explain this? Fiddling around with the team positions, the predictor says that Port wins against Fremantle away 88-82, for .58 wins. Whereas Sydney beats Essendon by 35 points at home and it's credited .87 wins. Some criminal underrating of Fremantle or overrating of Essendon going on.

Without looking at the data I'd say if you score 80 points against Freo it's worth a fair bit even if you lose. It's all about how much you can score in comparison to the defence you're playing and how much the opposition can score against you compared to their usual output. Make sense? Feel like I'm rambling.

So if the Swans keep Essendon to 60 points it's considered a greater achievement.

Basically scoring 100 points against St Kilda isn't nearly as highly rated as scoring 100 against Freo/Sydney

 

[TennisPlayerAndy]

There needs to be a 2015 Squiggle thread.

 

[Richo83]

Does anyone know where one can find the round one tips?

 

[Final Siren]

Home grand advantage for Geelong seems to be messed up as well.

We get a home ground advantage for our matches at the MCG when we shouldn't e.g. in Hawthorn vs. Geelong when the Hawks are the home team they're forecast to win 111-76, but only 99-88 when Geelong are the home team despite both matches being at the same ground. Same deal vs. Collingwood.

Okay, let's talk about home ground advantage! Because I've come to believe that what everyone says about home ground advantage is wrong.

The general idea, of course, is that teams play better at home. And indeed, you can find lots of statistical evidence for this. So okay, so let me ask: Why? What helps teams at home?

Some possible reasons I can think of:

1. Better familiarity with quirks of the field (its dimensions, local wind patterns, etc)
2. Better support from fans
3. Use of familiar/better facilities
4. Reduced need to travel
5. Mental aspects, maybe? Players more at ease when they know it's a home game? Higher expectations? Who knows, but I'll include it for completeness

Now, football has changed a lot over the last 30 years. There are two big differences with regard to home grounds. First, all those suburban grounds, like Victoria Park and Windy Hill, where teams used to train on them and then play on them on the weekend, and they could fall apart in patches or turn into swamps, and have complex swirling wind patterns due to the lack of large grandstands... they're all gone. All Melbourne teams today play out of the MCG or Docklands, and they don't train on them, and the grounds are of a high standard and rarely have unpredictable qualities.

So when two Melbourne-based clubs play each other, we should probably not expect ground familiarity to matter much any more. Certainly, it should matter much, much less than it used to. This is obvious when you think about it, but we're all so used to the historical idea of home ground advantage meaning "ground familiarity" that a lot of people still seem to assume that's the case today. So when Geelong plays a "home" game against Collingwood at the MCG, we tend to think automatically that's a case of the Pies having home ground advantage. Which, as I'll get to, I can't find support in the data for at all.

The other change is we have a national competition. So where in 1980 traveling to an away game meant going across town, in 2015 it can mean hopping on a plane. Travel can be a lot more disruptive.

For matches involving teams from the same city, then, we should expect home ground advantage to be less of a factor, while remaining important in games between teams from different cities. And this is indeed what I see in the stats, and why the squiggle awards a 12-pt advantage in games between interstate opponents. Geelong is considered an interstate team, for this purpose, purely because it acts like one: it plays significantly better at home.

Now the interesting part. Sometimes -- not often, but at least a few times a year -- we have matches where the home team has to play on the away team's home ground. A lot of these involve Geelong travelling to Melbourne. These are cases where one team has a "home game advantage" while the other has a "home ground advantage."

And what happens? Well, I've looked at this in a fair bit of detail. There isn't a ton of data, since it's only a few games a year, from which I can't confidently draw conclusions. But I've thrown a lot of different algorithms at it, to try it from all different angles. And the ones that are based on the actual ground rather than who's home game it is consistently do worse:

• 2000: -4 tips
• 2001: -4
• 2002: -1
• 2003: -3
• 2004: -1
• 2005: same
  
• 2006: +1
• 2007: same
• 2008: -2
• 2009: -1
• 2010: -3
• 2011: +1
• 2012: -2
• 2013: same
• 2014: -2

Last year, I tripped myself on this, because I just swallowed the common wisdom of home ground advantage being all about the actual ground. But clearly this doesn't produce a more accurate model, at least for squiggles. And I don't include factors in the squiggle just because I think they should make a difference; I only include factors that can be statistically shown to make a difference. So I am reverting to home game advantage.

Why does this work better? I can't say for sure, and I can't rule out that it isn't just Geelong being weird. For example, maybe Geelong home games at the 'G all involve big-drawing crowds, and the Cats players get extra motivated (esp. v Hawks), and they play out of their skins, and there are enough games like that to skew the whole data set.

This is possible. It's also possible that some of those reasons up above are more important than we give them credit for: the extra fan support, the mental aspects. I suspect there is something in this, because there are also cases like Richmond selling home games to Cairns that clearly did seem to disadvantage them, yet these are being balanced out and then some by counter-examples.

I don't know for sure what's behind it. But I do know I can't statistically justify a home ground advantage based on the actual field.

 

[Final Siren]

This makes sense - but how do you explain this? Fiddling around with the team positions, the predictor says that Port wins against Fremantle away 88-82, for .58 wins. Whereas Sydney beats Essendon by 35 points at home and it's credited .87 wins. Some criminal underrating of Fremantle or overrating of Essendon going on.

This and many other common questions are actually answered if you click the INFO icon on the interactive squiggle:

When determining "probable wins" in the Season Predictor, this is calculated as follows:

PROBABILITY = 0.52 + (0.01 x PREDICTED MARGIN)

This roughly describes the accuracy of the squiggle's tips over the last 30 years. That is, the bigger the predicted margin, the more likely the tip is to be correct.

That is, when the squiggle predicts Port to win by 6 points, it's not particularly confident, and the game could go either way. When it tips Sydney by 35, it's pretty sure the Swans will win, so awards them most of a full win.

It's like this: imagine you have two 50/50 games. In real life, that means you have a 25% chance of losing both, a 50% chance of winning 1, and 25% chance of winning both. The squiggle will award 0.50 wins for each game, leading to a predicted total of 1 win.

This is a handy way to predict the ladder because it removes the need to predict which 50/50 game you'll win. We can just estimate that you'll win 1 in total.

 

[Suntory Boss Coffee]

Looking forward to the squiggle this year

 

[Power Raid]

Looking forward to the squiggle this year

 

[Wundo]

Mr squiggle looks like he's an adelaide supporter.

 

[cryptor]

Mr squiggle looks like he's an adelaide supporter.

True, but it's actually just his hat.

 

[Shane Hird]

I lurvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvve the squiggle.

 

[Gydafud]

How can I start the 2015 season based off pre-season form? Want to see how the season would play out based on what we have seen in 2015 so far.

 

[cryptor]

How can I start the 2015 season based off pre-season form? Want to see how the season would play out based on what we have seen in 2015 so far.

That's not going to show you much given teams haven't been going with their best available, playing how they would if there were points on the line or playing games with the same rules (9 pointers and the clock difference).

 

[Gydafud]

That's not going to show you much given teams haven't been going with their best available, playing how they would if there were points on the line or playing games with the same rules (9 pointers and the clock difference).

I just wanted to see for shits and giggles

 

[RuFiO]

Don't even need to bother with the squiggle for us this season.

 

[Mubarak in De Nile]

This is possible. It's also possible that some of those reasons up above are more important than we give them credit for: the extra fan support, the mental aspects. I suspect there is something in this, because there are also cases like Richmond selling home games to Cairns that clearly did seem to disadvantage them, yet these are being balanced out and then some by counter-examples.

I don't know for sure what's behind it. But I do know I can't statistically justify a home ground advantage based on the actual field.[/QUOTE]

When I was studying for my sports psychology degree we looked closely at the famous Bryan Royko study on home ground advantage in the EPL. Ryan Boyko, a research assistant in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, studied 5,000 EPL games from 1992 to 2006, to discern any officiating bias and the influence of home crowds. The data which was published in the Journal of Sports Sciences suggested that for every additional 10,000 people attending, home team advantage increased by 0.1 goals. Additionally, his study proved what many football fans already suspect, that home teams are likely to be awarded more penalty kicks, but crucially, this is more likely with inexperienced referees. So building referee profiles can clearly be a very telling refinement for HFA figures.

Other research suggests that for all sports, home ground advantage seems to be strongest in the early period after the creation of a new league. The effect seems to have become somewhat weaker in some sports in recent decades (which seems pretty consistent with Final Siren's points about the effects of changes in the last 30 years).

And then of course, there's Melissa Anne Anderson's even more eloquent dissection of the home ground advantage conundrum in her paper, "Home Comforts: The Role of Hormones Territoriality and Perceptions on the Home Advantage in Football".

Actually I don't have a sports psychology degree at all - just got this stuff from Wikipedia. Interesting though...

 

[Royce Hafey]

The starting position for the Tigers provides confirmation for what it feels for a supporter - that we just need to sort out our forward line to go a step forward.

 

[Final Siren]

I was going to start a new thread and then I didn't. But I have squiggles!

Round 1, 2015​

Or in ANIMATED GIF form:

How much can you tell from one round of football?

Plenty! Especially when teams conform to expectation. It's one thing to excuse a one-off performance, but another when it's the latest in a series. On that score, Geelong and North both look well off the pace of the top teams, while Adelaide have carried their late-2014 form into 2015 and are knocking on the door.

The Tigers had a terrific week, not so much because they beat Carlton, but because three of teams they have to beat out for a place in the 8 stumbled: Geelong, North Melbourne, and West Coast. It was a pretty good week for Essendon, too, despite their loss, for the same reason.

Collingwood started 2015 ranked very low, due to their injury-blighted end to 2014, and did enough to suggest they're not that bad. Melbourne turned in a most unDemonlike performance, kicking an enormous score for a team that didn't break 100 points last year. The Dees drew a very amusing squiggle last year, sailing along the bottom of the chart, and they may be set to do something interesting again.

After Round 1, the squiggle predictor says:

​

This is where everyone will finish if they continue to perform exactly as the squiggle has them now. That won't happen, of course, but I find it a pretty good indicator of a team's current trajectory.

All this and more available from the interactive squiggle page!

 

[Suntory Boss Coffee]

gtoat

 

[Crankyhawk]

Hail the return of the squiggle!

 

[CotchNCo]

The blues logo in this always makes me laugh.

 

[Bic]

Awesome. Can't help but feel West Coast are a little overs here.

 

[Final Siren]

Awesome. Can't help but feel West Coast are a little overs here.

They look like that to me, too, but the Eagles had a big finish to 2014, beating the Crows by 5 goals, Collingwood by 10 goals, Melbourne by 10 goals, and the Suns by 8 goals. The only reason they didn't make the finals was Richmond's amazing 9-game streak.

If I remember right, the Eagles didn't beat a top 8 team in 2014, but still, if the Tigers hadn't pulled off a miracle, more people would probably be taking West Coast seriously as a contender this year.