I was doing a bit of messing around with the AFL 2020 fixture and I thought some on here might enjoy seeing some of the numbers I came up with. Hopefully there aren't any glaring errors.
I was looking at the number of days break in between games relative to the opposition in a given week and factored in whether a team was playing at home or travelling.
In a nutshell positive numbers means a team has a longer break and negative numbers mean the opposition has a longer break. Big numbers tend to mean a team is coming off the bye.
Example: In Round 2 Essendon play Sydney at the SCG. Essendon had 6 days break between round 1 and 2. Sydney also had 6 days break. Since Essendon had to travel I reduced their break by 0.25 and so I came up with (6 - 0.25) - 6 = -0.25 (Essendon very slightly disadvantaged).
I broke the travelling factor into 3 groups, interstate travel to WA = -0.5, other interstate travel = -0.25 and travel to China = -1 (so the theory was travelling reduced the break between games). I ignored Melbourne teams going to Geelong and left them as 0 same as all other home games.
Note: I did not factor perceived difficulty of opponents into this analysis as I don't know about everyone else but as far as I'm concerned outside of Richmond, West Coast and Gold Coast anyone could finish just about anywhere and I didn't really see the point. Also round 1 (probably 2 week break approx for everyone) and round 23 (floating rounds) were excluded and byes are blanked out in that particular round.
Essendon do really well on this metric, with only a single game where any opponents have more than a 2 day advantage over us which is round 15 when we play Western Bulldogs coming off their bye. Most of our other disadvantages are only a single day give or take the travel adjustment. According to this the toughest period will be rounds 7, 8, 9 and 10 where we play 3 rounds with shorter breaks than our opposition over a 4 week period. Overall I feel like we are far better off in terms of breaks than we have been in most years.
I've included the full table which shows the numbers for all teams in each round.
I was looking at the number of days break in between games relative to the opposition in a given week and factored in whether a team was playing at home or travelling.
In a nutshell positive numbers means a team has a longer break and negative numbers mean the opposition has a longer break. Big numbers tend to mean a team is coming off the bye.
Example: In Round 2 Essendon play Sydney at the SCG. Essendon had 6 days break between round 1 and 2. Sydney also had 6 days break. Since Essendon had to travel I reduced their break by 0.25 and so I came up with (6 - 0.25) - 6 = -0.25 (Essendon very slightly disadvantaged).
I broke the travelling factor into 3 groups, interstate travel to WA = -0.5, other interstate travel = -0.25 and travel to China = -1 (so the theory was travelling reduced the break between games). I ignored Melbourne teams going to Geelong and left them as 0 same as all other home games.
Note: I did not factor perceived difficulty of opponents into this analysis as I don't know about everyone else but as far as I'm concerned outside of Richmond, West Coast and Gold Coast anyone could finish just about anywhere and I didn't really see the point. Also round 1 (probably 2 week break approx for everyone) and round 23 (floating rounds) were excluded and byes are blanked out in that particular round.
Essendon do really well on this metric, with only a single game where any opponents have more than a 2 day advantage over us which is round 15 when we play Western Bulldogs coming off their bye. Most of our other disadvantages are only a single day give or take the travel adjustment. According to this the toughest period will be rounds 7, 8, 9 and 10 where we play 3 rounds with shorter breaks than our opposition over a 4 week period. Overall I feel like we are far better off in terms of breaks than we have been in most years.
I've included the full table which shows the numbers for all teams in each round.
