The Fairness of the AFL Fixture

In yesterday’s post I rated the difficulty of each AFL team’s draw in 2015. Each year there is a fair bit of variation in the difficulty of the draw between teams; for example, in 2015 I consider the club with the easiest draw, West Coast, to have a goal a game advantage over the club with the hardest draw, Port Adelaide.

Over at the FootyMaths Institute it has been proposed that a fairer 2015 fixture would have each team play opponents of roughly the same level throughout the year. To achieve this it has been suggested splitting the teams into three conferences of roughly equal strength as follows, with each team playing the teams in their own conference twice and every other team once.

Conference 1: Teams ranked 1, 6, 7, 12, 13, 18.
Conference 2: 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17.
Conference 3: 3, 4, 9, 10, 15, 16.

That seems about as fair as you can get to me. (Ladder positions can be misleading of course, but I doubt the AFL is going to do a fixture based on a Power Rankings system!) A comment I made was that the conferences need only be notional; that is, teams could be split into conferences for the purposes of the fixture, but the ladder is calculated according to the same method as it always was.

Yesterday I wondered how far the actual AFL fixture deviated from this ‘fair’ system. To compare the two, let’s see how each team’s draw would be rated under the FootyMaths system. I am going to assume that the FootyMaths fixture would result in no net home ground advantage to any team over the course of the year. This probably will not strictly hold because of things like Geelong playing in Geelong against Melbourne clubs, but unless you get savaged like St. Kilda did for 2015, net home ground advantage is generally the least important component of a club’s fixture.

Here are the results:

	Overall	Effect of not playing own team	Effect of teams played twice
Sydney	78.0	33.8	44.2
Hawthorn	68.0	34.6	33.4
Port Adelaide	41.8	21.5	20.3
North Melbourne	28.8	9.2	19.6
Adelaide	24.2	16.7	7.5
Fremantle	21.9	15.6	6.3
Essendon	18.2	3.9	14.3
West Coast	17.5	13.4	4.1
Richmond	11.8	6.5	5.3
Geelong	4.8	7.1	-2.2
Carlton	1.3	-4.6	5.8
Gold Coast	-13.7	-12.0	-1.6
Collingwood	-26.5	-12.7	-13.8
Western Bulldogs	-42.7	-20.8	-21.9
GWS	-51.4	-21.0	-30.3
Brisbane	-54.2	-22.4	-31.7
Melbourne	-57.0	-27.9	-29.1
St. Kilda	-70.9	-40.7	-30.3

What the - ? This seems to be more uneven than the current AFL fixture! Note that the easiness of each’s team fixture is essentially determined by their ranking. Lower-ranked teams are now hit by a double whammy: not only are they the only team that do not get to play themselves when each team plays each other once, they are also the only team in their ‘conference’ that do not get to play themselves twice either.

We seem to have hit on something crucial here about what constitutes a ‘fair’ fixture. On one hand you could argue that the AFL should compensate for lower-ranked teams not being able to play themselves and give them easier teams to play to make up for it (although they seem to have overcompensated on this point). On the other hand you could argue that a ‘fair’ system should abstract from this effect.

Note here that a ‘fair’ fixture could result in teams having draws of varying difficulty. Perhaps Sydney and Hawthorn might have the easiest draws under the FootyMaths system because they do not have to play themselves, but this does not necessarily mean that the fixture is not ‘fair’.

What happens if we take out the effect of not having to play your own team? (I have also taken out the net home ground advantage from the AFL fixture as well.)

	FMI fixture	AFL fixture
Gold Coast	10.4	-8.4
North Melbourne	10.4	-19.7
Essendon	10.4	-0.8
Carlton	10.4	19.7
Sydney	10.4	-63.8
St. Kilda	10.4	93.2
Hawthorn	-1.1	-96.2
Port Adelaide	-1.1	-101.4
Collingwood	-1.1	27.7
Richmond	-1.1	-17.9
Western Bulldogs	-1.1	77.0
Melbourne	-1.1	107.5
GWS	-9.3	72.5
Fremantle	-9.3	-38.1
Geelong	-9.3	-88.7
Adelaide	-9.3	-24.2
West Coast	-9.3	27.8
Brisbane	-9.3	33.9
Standard deviation	8.3	63.6

Now that seems better. Basically the difference between the hardest ‘conference’ and the easiest one is less than a point a game. For the AFL fixture the difference between the hardest draw and the easiest one is about two goals a game.

Personally I like the FootyMaths proposal; it seems to me about as fair as you can get with each team playing 22 matches. It might be even better than having a 17 round season.

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.

The Finger Points Outwards - No. 92

COMIC BOOKS: Analysis of the gender composition of comic book characters at Marvel and DC Comics. The majority of characters are male, driven to some extent by a lack of female villains.

VIDEO GAMES: Charlie Brooker on the challenges of being a female on the internet. And also on why video games get a bit of a bad rap.

BASKETBALL: Not doing my laugh-at-my-NBA-predictions this year. (What happened, Harden and Howard?!) Besides FiveThirtyEight are doing it better. Looks like the top five teams in the Western Conference are pretty even.

SPORTS: I have often wondered, if you remove the effects of the car, who would be the best Formula One driver? This master thesis goes a lot further. Answer on page 64 (it’s not Michael Schumacher).

ECONOMICS/POLITICS: When people ask if I am left-wing or right-wing, I am going to reply ‘Economist’.

‘Ms. Marvel’, Marvel’s Muslim Hero: Quite Good, But Not As Diverse As Suggested

Marvel Comics’ ‘Ms. Marvel’ series, which has a female, Muslim lead, has been a relative success for the publisher, with the first issue having been re-printed seven times, as well as selling many digital copies. That is part of why I had not read it myself until a week or so ago, though I was eager to see what the fuss was about. Was this series really breaking down long-standing barriers in superhero comics? Not quite … but that does not mean it isn’t a fun read, although probably more for a teenage audience.

A fellow named Chris Sims came up with this theory that Marvel tries to re-invent Spider-Man every decade – Nova in the ‘70s, Speedball in the ‘80s, Darkhawk in the ‘90s, and the new, ‘Ultimate’ version of Spider-Man in the 2000s. Alliteration aside, there is more than a touch of Peter Parker about Kamala Khan, our new Ms. Marvel. She’s a bit of an outsider, a bit insecure about herself, and a bit of a nerd – though of the hero fan fiction writing variety rather than a science nerd. And while her heritage is foreign to the US, she herself is very much of Jersey City.

It seems what is meant to make Kamala unique is her growing up in a Muslim family. But, you probably guessed it … that means her family want her to conform to their religious beliefs, do not want her to be around boys, and basically display many other traits typically associated with parents from the Indian subcontinent. The overprotective parent figure is not really that new to Marvel as well – Spider-Man had to tread gingerly around his Aunt May, Daredevil’s father kept him locked up with his law books, and even Thor the thunder god had his father constantly deciding what was best for him.

However all of this is not to say that Ms. Marvel is not a well-written book; just that the Muslim hero angle does not make the book as different from Marvel’s previous output as one might think. Both Kamala and her best friend Kiki, in particular, have dialogue that seems more natural and engaging than most other Marvel books. Also Kamala’s hero worship of the original Ms Marvel, Carol Danvers, and the other Avengers, feels like a very modern type of reverence, reflecting the mind-sets of the fanfic/cosplay generation.  It remains to be seen how well the series can transcend the twelve-issue theory – the series was reportedly meant to end at issue seven. But even if it conks out in its second year, that will not change its historical importance in making Marvel Comics a little bit less ‘male and white’.

Royals, Giants, and the Randomness of Baseball’s Postseason

Baseball manager Billy Beane was quoted in ‘Moneyball’ as saying ‘My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is [Beane expletive] luck.’ During this October’s entertaining, but somewhat unusual, Major League Baseball postseason I have often thought about that quote.

The teams with the best record in each league, Washington and the LA Angels, could not even make it to the league championship series. LA Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, one of the favourites for the National League Most Valuable Player award, went 0-2 in his only two starts. The St Louis Cardinals, last in the league in home runs, suddenly started smacking them out of the ballpark at a furious rate. And the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants, two teams that made the playoffs on ‘wildcards’, and won 55 per cent of their games during the regular season, are contesting the World Series.

Baseball almost rivals association football/soccer for the extent to which the favourite does not win. (Chris Anderson and David Sally in ‘The Numbers Game’ found that favourites win about 60 per cent of the time in baseball, compared to two-thirds of the time in basketball and American football, and just over half the time in association football.) But in football, the league champion is determined by each team playing 30-40 games, with no playoffs. In baseball, there is a regular season of each team playing 162 games, which determines who qualifies for the playoffs. But then the number of games each team plays to determine the champion is relatively tiny: no team plays more than 20 games, and four teams play no more than six games. With this in mind, you can see where Beane is coming from.

Playoff series are not that good at determining which is the ‘best’ team; if one team has a 55 per cent chance of winning, you would need a 269 game series to ensure that the stronger team won the series 95 per cent of the time. Football, probably unintentionally, has got around that problem by not having playoffs at all. However the World Series is, with the Super Bowl, the biggest playoff institution in American sports, so it is almost certain that Major League Baseball would not abandon it. And plus, the World Series is fun – few baseball fans would be turned off by the prospect of the Royals and Giants slugging it out for seven games. But for those trying their best to succeed, and who then have to weather the criticism following a playoff loss, you could see why the postseason would be a frustrating time indeed.

American Novels in the Man Booker Prize

In the past few days there have been a couple of articles on ‘The Guardian’ website about the decision to open up the Man Booker Prize to American novels. Susanna Rustin wrote that, while she loves American novels, she was worried that including them in Booker contention might take attention away from good Commonwealth writing. Australian novelist Peter Carey outright disagreed with the decision, saying that the ‘particular cultural flavour’ of the award will now be lost.

If the aim of the Booker Prize is to reward the ‘best’ novel in English then it must include American authors. But I think what most opponents to the inclusion of American authors are saying is that should not be the aim of the Booker. I agree – there was a nice symmetry in the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (and National Book Award for Fiction) rewarding US authors, while novels from other countries competed for the Booker. Now Commonwealth novels have less chance of winning a major prize.

How much less chance? I had a look over the Booker and Pulitzer winners since 2000 to see which American novels might have taken the Booker home. Given the outpouring of critical adoration for Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Gilead’ (2005 Pulitzer winner) and Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ (2007 winner), I would have been surprised if either of those had not won the Booker if eligible. Other American novels that I think would have had decent chances are ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’, ‘Middlesex’, ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’, ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’, and the-novel-that-probably-many-people-think-won-the-Pulitzer ‘The Corrections’.

Without working out how those novels would have lined up with eligibility dates (the novel that came up against ‘Life of Pi’ would have had a tough contest), there seems to me a good chance that about four or five US novels might have won the Booker over the past fifteen years if eligible. Actually I think that could well reflect roughly how the shares work out going forward – one-third US winners, one-third UK/Ireland winners, and one-third from everywhere else. So if that occurred, about one-third of potential Commonwealth winners would miss out, which is not drastic. On the other hand, those that miss out are probably those that would benefit most from the prize – the consequences of, say, ‘Wolf Hall’ having missed out on the Booker might be less than for other novels.

Overall then I think Peter Carey is right – something unique has been lost. Which is not to say that the US novels that get up would not be worthy winners; I personally loved one of this year’s contenders, Joshua Ferris’ ‘To Rise Again At A Decent Hour’. It is just a bit of a needless change really, even if Australians would crow a bit more if Peter Carey or Tim Winton ‘toppled the Yanks’.