A Quick Look at the AFL 2020 Fixture

The fixtures for the AFL’s 2020 competitions came out this week, and as usual the discussion revolves around the “fairness” of the draw. Which, of course, isn’t particularly fair, as the League balances commercial imperatives, equalisation objectives, and keeping Collingwood happy by not giving them too many interstate trips. (OK, we’re maybe a little cynical […]

A Quick Post-Season Review 2019

After writing an effort post for the mid season I’m going to make this one quick, as it’s been a month since the grand final – which frankly was pretty boring for anyone but Richmond fans. We’ve tended to have pretty entertaining GFs for the last little while, so maybe we were due for a […]

Midseason Report – 2019

Since we’re at the turning point, with the bye rounds to come, I thought it a good opportunity to whip up a “quick” post on the season as well as GRAFT’s tracking thereof. There’s not much editing in this and it’s mostly subjective opinion though I’ve sandwiched it with some numbers which I would like […]

Post Season Wrap – 2018

I haven’t posted too much here during the AFL season, mainly, since I had bedded down the updated systems and was able to continue things as normal through the season there wasn’t too much too discuss about the back-end. But now as the season has wrapped up and the dust has settled it is of […]

Towards A New Model – Part 3

In previous posts on this matter, I settled on the gamma distribution as the model, as it was a continuous analogue of the poisson curve, and provided a curve that reflected actual real world scores. The next little challenge was to calibrate it against the “par” scores that GRAFT generates. The par scores typically range […]

Rushed, Behind

It has been a couple of months since the last update, and really there’s not that much to say as far as this website is concerned. As anticipated, I’ve been flat-out with other things, in particular moving house, which is always haunt. Now I’ve settled in enough that I can actually sit down and get […]

Towards A New Model – Part 1

The past couple of weeks have seen small but significant steps on the development towards the retooling my sim model for AFL. The first thing I had to do was update my historical data from, the AFL Tables scrapings. For that I dragged out my old parsing code which still works, but had to deal […]

Hitting the Track

Starting to look at next year’s fixture. No great insights as yet, just basically cleaning up names of stadia and that sort of thing (search and replace Optus Stadium with Perth Stadium, Goombadome with Kardinia Park, that sorta thing) Also stripping down the website gen code for next year. I haven’t started on the revamped […]

Changing of the Guard

So, that’s the winter sports all wrapped up for the year – at least in theory. We saw Richmond triumphant in a game that saw them break down Adelaide’s vaunted attack while keeping up their own end. In particular, Dustin Martin had a fine game to sweep the treble of the Norm Smith, although like […]

2017 Grand Final Preview and beyond

According to the main GRAFT ratings, we have Richmond rated as 3 points better than Adelaide, but that is based on a home ground advantage since Richmond are playing at their home ground against the interstate team. If you otherwise consider grand finals to be neutral in general, then you would remove the standard 12 […]