AFL WOMEN’S Rankings: Preview 2020

The AFL Women’s competition is back in 2020 for its fourth season, and so are my team rankings. In this preview post: ranking the four new teams, the effects of the uneven fixture, and which teams the rankings think are most likely to make the finals.

Ranking the new teams

The 2020 AFLW season will be the first for four teams: Gold Coast, Richmond, St. Kilda, and West Coast. Their entry has led to another bout of player movement between clubs, including former Bulldogs captain Katie Brennan becoming the first captain for the Tigers, and Dana Hooker moving from Fremantle to cross-town rivals West Coast. How do we rank these new entrants, and how does this affect the rankings of the ten existing teams?

Well, over the past few years everyone has had quite a bit of experience trying to figure out how new AFLW teams may go, including the original eight teams in the league’s inaugural season. My approach has been to use the bookmakers’ odds to set the initial rankings (though I’ve varied slightly each time in the exact way I’ve used them).

This approach has a few minor issues: the bookmakers’ odds may also take into account the difficulty of each team’s fixture – more on that below – which I haven’t tried to separate out. I also ended up excluding the Adelaide Crows from my regression, as last year they were such a massive outlier (more on that below as well).

Unsurprisingly three of the new teams are at long odds for the premiership, with Gold Coast’s odds being the longest. The exception is Richmond. This could in part be due to bullish Tiger bettors still basking in the glow of last season’s men’s premiership. Richmond has stacked its team with big-name forwards, and the AFLW has so far been a competition dominated more by midfielders. However, rival AFLW players also believe the Tigers to be the most likely new side to succeed, and a 30 point win against the Eagles in a practice match doesn’t hurt this view.

I’ve put the Tigers in among the group of teams underneath Adelaide, with Carlton, Fremantle, the Kangaroos, and Melbourne (see below). The other new teams I’ve put down with Collingwood, Geelong – one of the ‘luckiest’ finals sides there ever was, helped by the AFLW’s conference system – and the Brisbane Lions.

Note: Apart from changing the rankings to incorporate the new teams, I’ve also changed the Kangaroos’ home ground ‘disadvantage’ when playing away in Melbourne, and applied this retrospectively. With the Roos seeming more now like a part-Melbourne based team, I’ve done away with the disadvantage entirely, similar to Geelong in the men’s competition (although not the Cats’ women’s team).

Which club has the easiest fixture?

Many complaints are made about the unevenness of the AFL men’s fixture, but its effect pales against that of the fixture in the women’s league. Unlike the men’s league, AFLW has more teams than rounds. The league’s administration may have, in theory, made the conferences more even this year than last year. However, the addition of four new teams, taking the total up to fourteen, means that each club will not play five other teams at all.

As things sit now, the team that looks like it will benefit the most from this inequity in the fixture is the Fremantle Dockers (see table below). Of last year’s top teams the Dockers do not play Adelaide, the Kangaroos, and of course themselves. In addition, one of their ‘away’ games is against the Eagles in Perth.

Fremantle gains an estimated goal per game from the ease of their fixture, or one more expected win. In a season of eight rounds, that could come in handy when fighting for one of the six finals spots. Another finals aspirant Melbourne also avoids playing Adelaide, while Carlton and Richmond are among the eight teams that have to face the league’s powerhouse.

At the other end, St. Kilda gets a baptism of fire, playing every highly ranked side other than the Kangaroos. The Saints also receive only one ‘home’ game against a non-Victorian club, while they have to travel interstate twice. Of course, these fixture assessments could look very different once the finals actually approach.

ACL (Adelaide Crows ligaments) injuries even up the league

The 2019 AFLW premiers the Adelaide Crows may have been the most dominant team – men’s or women’s – in the history of the AFL. After tripping up in their opening match against the Bulldogs, the Crows got better and better, winning their matches by an average of 40 points, and their final three matches by an average of nearly ten goals.

In contrast, last year’s men premiers Richmond finished with a ranking of about five goals. The virtually all-conquering 2000 Essendon team won their matches by an average of over 50 points, but the average winning margin in the men’s league is around 30 to 40 points. In the AFLW last year it was just over 20 points, and that is with Adelaide’s thrashings propping it up.

Therefore, as we stand at the start of the season the Crows are estimated have close to a 100 per cent chance of winning each home and away match, and about a 90 per cent chance of winning all eight of them. The bookmakers don’t have Adelaide as being anywhere near that strong. What the bookmakers know that the rankings do not is that the Crows have lost both of their co-captains Chelsea Randall and Erin Phillips to ACL injuries – Randall for the whole season, and Phillips potentially so. Even aside from those injuries, one may expect Adelaide to regress a little. It is still a strong team however, led by All-Australians Ebony Marinoff and Anne Hatchard.

Player movement in the AFLW has made predictions from past performances fraught so far, but the rankings like six teams in particular to make this year’s finals. Adelaide, the Kangaroos, and Richmond (the Tigers based almost entirely on bookmakers’ odds) are considered the strongest teams in Conference A, while Fremantle, Carlton, and Melbourne are the favourites to emerge from Conference B. Gold Coast and St. Kilda are considered the most likely to be at the bottom of their respective conferences, with the Saints’ tough fixture hurting them.

I’ll be back each week with more AFLW rankings goodness, hopefully with statistics from the AFL website up and running again to support my number-crunching. In the meantime, here are the rankings’ predictions for the first round of matches. (Brisbane’s estimated probability of winning against Adelaide is actually 0.2 per cent, but for the reasons above, is likely somewhat underestimated.)