The 2015 AFL Finals rounds are about to start.
The top 4 teams going into the Finals are Fremantle, West Coast, Hawthorn and Sydney. Their momentum throughout the twenty-three rounds of the regular season was:
At the other end of the AFL Ladder, the bottom four team were Essendon, Gold Coast, Brisbane and Carlton. Their momentum was:
Sam Robertson and his colleagues (2015) have reported their analysis of match outcomes in the 2013 and 2014 AFL seasons. They indicate:
Logistic regression and decision tree (chi-squared automatic interaction detection) analyses both revealed relative differences between opposing teams for “kicks” and “goal conversion” as the most influential in explaining match outcome, with two models achieving 88.3% and 89.8% classification accuracies, respectively.
In the 2015 season, the third placed team, Hawthorn, were the team that took most kicks and their kicks at goal were the most accurate (55.1%). Essendon were the least accurate team kicking at goal in the 2015 season (46.3%). The two bottom teams Brisbane and Carlton scored the least Behinds in the season. Both teams had the highest losing average margin too (Carlton 51.7, Brisbane 48.2).
Fremantle, the Minor Premiers, unlike West Coast and Hawthorn, did not have a high average winning margin. In fact, they were ranked just above Carlton and Essendon at (29.2 points per victory).
Photo Credit
Footy (Beau Lebens, CC BY-NC 2.0)
