Who Has The Easiest AFL Draw in 2015?

The 2015 AFL fixture was released today, which means it is time to do my annual assessment of the difficulty of each team’s draw. This is done by summing up, over every game a club plays, the easiness of their opponent as based on my AFL Power Rankings at the end of this season, while adjusting for home ground advantage.

The rating for each team’s draw can be broken down into three components:

-          The effect of not playing your own team: For example, Hawthorn’s draw is made easier by the simple fact that they don’t have to play Hawthorn.

 

-          Net home ground advantage: This is simply the net effect of the adjustments for home ground advantage across the season. If you want to do well on this component don’t play your ‘home’ games interstate! Geelong is rated highly because I give it home ground advantage when playing Melbourne teams in Geelong.

 

-          The effect of which teams your team plays twice: This is the collective strength of the opponents that each teams plays twice, with a higher rating for this component meaning that you have easier opponents in your return bouts.

Which clubs should send the AFL a fruit basket? The easiness of each AFL team’s draw in 2015, ranked from easiest to hardest, is shown in the table below:

	Overall	Effect of not playing own team	Net home ground advantage	Effect of teams played twice
West Coast	66.5	13.4	12.0	41.2
Melbourne	57.7	-27.9	6.0	79.6
Western Bulldogs	53.4	-20.8	18.0	56.2
GWS	30.4	-21.0	0.0	51.4
Carlton	16.5	-4.6	6.0	15.1
Adelaide	9.3	16.7	0.0	-7.4
Fremantle	-7.0	15.6	0.0	-22.6
Richmond	-10.9	6.5	-6.0	-11.4
Brisbane	-11.0	-22.4	0.0	11.5
Essendon	-11.0	3.9	-18.0	3.1
Sydney	-14.2	33.8	-18.0	-30.0
Collingwood	-15.6	-12.7	-18.0	15.1
St. Kilda	-18.2	-40.7	-30.0	52.5
North Melbourne	-19.4	9.2	-18.0	-10.6
Gold Coast	-20.5	-12.0	12.0	-20.4
Hawthorn	-27.1	34.6	0.0	-61.6
Geelong	-32.6	7.1	42.0	-81.7
Port Adelaide	-46.5	21.5	12.0	-79.9

Four teams in particular should be happy with their fixtures: West Coast, Melbourne, the Western Bulldogs, and Greater Western Sydney. The AFL has tended in recent years to give teams that finish near the bottom of the ladder an easy run. This season’s last-placed team, St. Kilda, does well in terms of which teams they play twice, but has been savaged in terms of home ground advantage.

At the other end, top-ranking teams Hawthorn, Geelong and Port Adelaide have relatively tough fixtures in terms of which clubs they play twice. The difficulties of Hawthorn’s and Port Adelaide’s draws are tempered by them not having to play themselves, while Geelong as mentioned above do well out of home ground advantage.

One unusual feature of the 2015 draw ratings is that only six teams have a ‘positive’ balance while two-thirds of the competition has a ‘negative’ balance. The ratings are fixed so that they sum to zero, so it suggests that the majority ‘suffer’ in return for a few teams having really good fixtures.

On that point, I would like to compare the ‘fairness’ of the 2015 fixture with the ‘fair fixture’ proposal over at the FootyMaths Institute. I might look at that topic in a future post.