Tanking in the AFL

Most AFL followers believe that ‘tanking’ – teams intentionally losing games, or at least not trying to win them - has occurred in the past, but what is the best way to prove that it happened? Here’s a statistical method that might offer some evidence.

From 1999 to 2006, a team received a priority pick if they had less than 20.5 premiership points (i.e. five wins or less) in the previous season.  This was the largest incentive to ‘tank’, as it gave you an extra high draft pick – at best, the team might not only have the first draft pick but also the second draft pick. Hawthorn’s Lance Franklin and Collingwood’s Scott Pendlebury are examples of players that their teams would not have been able to pick up without this rule. In 2007, the AFL changed the rules so that this incentive was removed; a team could still get a priority pick but it was either in the second round of the draft, or they had to be crappy for two years to get an extra first-round pick.

Hence, one way of finding evidence for tanking is as follows. For each season from 1999 to 2006, we ask: for the last team in the season that disqualified themselves from being able to receive a priority pick (that is, earned over 20 premiership points), how many matches had they played? Then we can compare this to when the last team would have disqualified themselves (that is, earned over 20 premiership points) for each season from 2007 onwards, if the old rule had applied. If tanking occurred, you would expect that the last team in the season to get over 20 premiership points would have done it sooner in the season during the era when the priority pick rule applied. Or in other words, when the priority pick rule applied, teams would hold off on earning more than 20 premiership points for much longer.

The results:

Season	Matches played by last team for season to earn over 20 premiership points
1999	15
2000	18
2001	15
2002	19
2003	19
2004	18
2005	16
2006	19
2007	14
2008	22
2009	21
2010	19
2011	18
2012	22

 

From 1999 to 2006, the average number of matches that the last team that disqualified themselves from the priority pick had played when they earned more than 20 premiership points was 17.4. This included two times when no team disqualified themselves from the priority pick after round 15, which suggests some rather prolonged tanking in those seasons. After the rule was changed, the average number of matches that the last team that disqualified themselves from the priority pick had played when they earned more than 20 premiership points was 19.3. But this number is dragged down considerably by the 2007 season, which may have to some extent been affected by Carlton qualifying for a priority pick under the new rules. Remove this season, and the average is 20.4.

Basically then, there seems to be little to no reluctance to earn more than 20 premiership points for the season now there is no significant disincentive for doing so. Along with the further changes to the rules in 2012, perhaps the removal of this incentive means that tanking allegations are now going to be largely consigned to history.

The Finger Points Outwards - No. 56

ECONOMICS: Does retail spending suffer in election years?

CRICKET: A relatively even era of Test cricket.

MUSIC: One Direction fans are pretty scary.

MUSIC: YouTube - the new hit factory.

COMIC BOOKS: DC vs Marvel in the graphic novel market.

ADVERTISING: Yes, you really can compare the meerkats.

BASKETBALL: Apparently Rajon Rondo is a hyper-competitive Connect Four player.

The Best Movie of 2012 In America (Or At Least The Most Enjoyed)

Recently, economist Dave Berri, in talking about the Oscars, pointed out that if we looked simply at revenue, the ‘best’ movie of 2012 was ‘Marvel’s The Avengers’. Essentially, he argued that, if we measured the worth of movies in terms of the utility they provide to customers, then ‘Marvel’s The Avengers’, as the movie in 2012 with the highest revenue, delivered more utility to people than any other film. (It’s not certain whether or not Dave Berri thinks that the movie which delivers the most utility is the ‘best’, but it does seem to be strongly suggested.)

But did ‘The Avengers’ really deliver the most utility? The reason I say this, which is a reason that also occurred to commenters on Berri’s site, is that measuring utility simply by revenue means that a dollar spent on one movie delivers exactly the same utility to the viewer as a dollar spent on any other movie. This is implausible – people certainly have different levels of enjoyment in relation to different movies.

One way to adjust for this is to use a measure of ‘user enjoyment’. In this case, I used the ‘user ratings’ from IMDB.com – given that each movie (at least the highest-grossing ones) has a large sample of users rating it, I reckon this is as good an indication as any of the average level of enjoyment that viewers got from that film. I then multiplied this rating by the $US box office revenue for each of the top 25 highest-grossing movies in the US that were released in 2012.  

Actually, I adjusted the user rating somewhat by multiplying it to the power of three. For example, if ‘Argo’ has a user rating of 8.0, and the latest ‘Twilight’ movie has a user rating of 5.7, then this means that each person, on average, got 2.8 times more enjoyment from watching ‘Argo’ then from watching ‘Twilight’ (whereas it would only be 1.4 times if I left the user rating as is). The result of this is that ‘Argo’ ends up with a higher total utility rating then ‘Twilight’ even with half the box-office take, which seems about ‘right’ to me (though it’s an arguable point).

As it turns out, this doesn’t make too much difference at the very top of the list. ‘The Avengers’ and ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ are clearly #’s 1 and 2, and you would have to put a very high weight on the user rating to get ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ to the top. ‘The Hobbit’, ‘The Hunger Games’, ‘Skyfall’, and ‘Django Unchained’ round out the top six, which in thinking about the movies released in 2012 that have had the largest impact, seems about ‘right’ to me as well.

	Total Gross US	User Rating	Utility Rating
Marvel's The Avengers	611,075,000	8.3	34,940,474,103
The Dark Knight Rises	458,507,400	8.6	29,163,638,281
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey	297,768,300	8.2	16,417,991,203
The Hunger Games	404,672,800	7.2	15,104,331,325
Skyfall	300,764,200	7.9	14,828,848,040
Django Unchained	158,523,600	8.6	10,082,988,692
The Amazing Spider-Man	268,093,100	7.2	10,006,521,339
Wreck-It Ralph	185,296,900	7.9	9,135,859,828
Brave	238,588,600	7.2	8,905,271,777
Lincoln	178,077,600	7.7	8,129,830,096
Ted	223,878,000	7.1	8,012,839,886
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted	212,127,600	7.0	7,275,976,680
Les Miserables	145,968,600	7.9	7,196,821,258
Argo	131,276,700	8.0	6,721,367,040
MIB 3	175,493,300	6.9	5,765,112,849
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2	289,032,000	5.7	5,352,670,318
Dr Seuss' The Lorax	214,030,500	6.3	5,351,768,443
21 Jump Street	137,651,800	7.2	5,137,825,905
Hotel Transylvania	146,654,900	7.0	5,030,263,070
Prometheus	123,984,900	7.2	4,627,711,596
Ice Age: Continental Drift	164,964,100	6.6	4,742,651,889
Safe House	126,930,700	6.8	3,991,107,386
The Vow	125,599,100	6.7	3,777,556,211
Snow White and the Huntsman	152,877,700	6.2	3,643,503,649
Taken 2	138,290,700	6.2	3,295,854,595

I think we can safely say then that ‘The Avengers’ did deliver more total utility/enjoyment than any other 2012 movie to cinema-goers in the US (and probably worldwide). I’m not going to go so far as to say that definitively makes it the ‘best’ movie, but as far as creating total happiness goes it looks to have had no peer.

The Wooden Finger Five: March 2013

 

Image: lastfm

1.    1/1 – Brian Eno

There have been two artists that have dominated my listening this month – Brian Eno and David Byrne/Talking Heads. In Eno’s case its because some generous crook has recently uploaded all of his albums onto YouTube. I had always avoided Eno’s ambient works, because you know, ambient music typically sucks. But putting on these albums for background music while I tap away on the computer has been a pleasant way to spend the work week. Because of the nature of the music it’s hard to pick a standout track, but the 16:30 track ‘1/1’ from ‘Music For Airports’ is the closest that ambient music has come to being stuck in my head after it’s finished.

2.    No-One Receiving – Brian Eno

Before he disappeared into the ambience genre, Eno delivered some great pop albums, and even though I’ve now discovered I don’t hate his later stuff, his first four pop albums are still my favourites. However, I differ from a lot of people (or at least critics) in that my two favourites are not ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’ and the hyper-lauded ‘Another Green World’, but ‘Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)’ and my new favourite ‘Before And After Science’. From the moment I pressed the rectangle on my phone, and the beats of ‘No-One Receiving’ came tumbling out, I knew this was the Eno album for me. And I ended up buying this album, so in my case the generous crook has ended up raising Eno’s royalties.

3.    Mind – Talking Heads

Last week I bought another instalment from the excellent 33 1/3 series of books, this one being Jonathan Lethem’s ‘Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music’. This was because of Jonathan Lethem rather than ‘Fear Of Music’ (which was produced by Brian Eno, by the way), which I had never heard, but it gave me the chance to discover the album simultaneously with reading the book. I had heard the big ‘hits’ from the album – ‘Life During Wartime’, ‘Heaven’, and ‘Memories Can’t Wait’, but I also got to discover some other great songs, including ‘Drugs’, ‘Air’, ‘I Zimbra’, and best of all, ‘Mind’. For those who like both their reading and music to be on the intellectual side, I recommend both the book and the album.   

4.    My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (album) – Brian Eno and David Byrne

Talking about books, David Byrne released a very good one last year called ‘How Music Works’, which was close to getting my ‘Book Of The Year’ nod. A particularly fascinating part is where he recounts the creation process around his collaboration with Eno – ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’. At one point, they conceived it as an album by an imaginary culture, and even though they abandoned that idea, you can still hear hints of it in the final mix. It was notable at the time for its samples of world music and preachers  - there are a lot of similarities between this and Primal Scream’s ‘Screamadelica’ album from a decade later.

 

5.    Inhaler – Foals

Yes, it’s not Eno or Byrne, and I’m probably a month late in getting on to this one, but it’s my favourite track from the past month. With the fuzzy guitars and shout of ‘… SPACE!’ Foals officially out-Muse Muse.