The full 2015 AFL fixture is scheduled to be released tomorrow, in what’s quickly becoming a big event in the 11-months-of-the-year footy calendar.
There’s a lot to digest on release.
– Who plays the most prime time games?
– Which team gets a solid 6-0 from GWS, St Kilda andamp; Melbourne?
– Who of the 2014 “middle six” will pull a 2012 Adelaide and get an easy ride?
– How many times will Collingwood travel outside of Melbourne?
This year, a lot of focus will be on the Thursday night fixtures, both in terms of the number of but also who gets a crack at the AFL’s latest prime time slot.
I’d guess we’ll see a lot of South and West Australian games on Thursdays, and I’d set the over/under at 9.5 over the course of the year. With the AFL rights negotiations coming to a head in the next couple of weeks – seriously Kim Williams, $1.8 billion? – don’t be surprised if one of the current non-holders of rights has a stab at this as a standalone purchase.
By I digress. As usual, we already know a couple of details:
– Carlton/Richmond returns to its opening night time slot
– The Pies and Lions will face off in Round 1 for the inaugural Dayne Beams Cup
– Five Anzac Day matches (which I think will be a one-off quirk rather than a sign of things to come)
– The Tigers play 15 of their 22 games at the ‘G
Something that always gets a lot of attention is the breaks between games each team gets. Focus turns to the number of six day breaks, and in particular, the dreaded consecutive six day break (CSDB).
It became the trendy thing to call out – other than the whole ‘Pies don’t fly’ shtick – a few years ago when sports scientists started flexing their muscles all over the AFL.
Turns out, it doesn’t matter. At least it doesn’t matter as much as you probably think. The numbers say the impact on winning percentage is really, really, small.
Over the past eight seasons, 48 per cent of games played by teams coming off a six-day break ended up in wins to the team coming off the six-day break. If your breakeven number of wins is 50/50, and for the AFL as a whole that’s pretty much a given, then it’s fair to say six days breaks have a very small impact on expected win percentage.
So don’t be too concerned if you see that your side plays a lot of Sunday games – it’s not likely to have a bit impact on their wins and losses over the course of the season.
But what about the CSDBs? These dreaded creatures only happen to a couple of sides a year, although there are potentially more of them to come in 2015 with the greater use of Thursday nights.
(in saying that, I would have thought the only team that would play a Saturday and Friday and Thursday stretch would be Collingwood, so who cares…)
Well, these do have a slightly more significant impact. Over the eight seasons I’ve looked at we’ve seen 107 instances of CSDB, with a winning percentage of 45 per cent on the second game of the stretch. That’s starting to get into significant territory, theoretically impacting winning percentage by 10 per cent. However, who you play probably has a much larger impact.
Six day breaks do have an impact, but what’s potentially more important is whether you are having more or less time off in between games than your opponent. If you’re both coming off of six day breaks, then all other things being equal you’d think that there would be no impact. By contrast, if you’re playing a team coming off a bye after having a six day break yourself, then you would expect there to be a fairly big impact.
Guess what? Over these eight seasons, there is absolutely no difference in winning percentage based solely on whether you’ve had more, the same, or less rest than your opponent. It’s literally a 50/50 proposition when you exclude the draws.
But that hides some very interesting figures that lurk beneath the surface. For my final trick, refer to the table below that shows the winning percentage of the left-hand team based on the days break of the team and its opponent:
So, when teams have the same number of days off, we’re pretty much looking at a zero impact scenario. The biggest impact looks to be when a team has an eight-day break and plays a team that comes off a sixday break – say a Saturday game between a team that played on a Friday night and a team that played on a Sunday. That looks like the one to watch out for.
But wait! I hear you screech. This table implies that teams coming off 10+ days break between games have a negative winning percentage!?!
Yes that’s right. A side coming of a 10+ day break over this sample is a team that had a bye in the previous week. These teams are a combined 92-113 in the past eight years for a winning percentage of 45 per cent.
But again this hides a very peculiar detail. Teams are coming off a bye and playing a team not coming off a bye in their week back have a combined winning percentage of just under 41 per cent – almost 20 per cent below the baseline 50/50 proposition.
Maybe not all AFL memes are garbage after all?
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