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One of the biggest points of contention in the AFL season so far has been the suspicion that we see more blowouts these days than ever before.
The thinking goes that the uneven balance of the competition – a handful of great sides, a vast collection of middle-of-the-roaders, and a handful of weaklings – has resulted in more games with larger margins and fewer with small margins.
I feel as though there have been more over the past few years, particularly big blowouts of 10 goals or more. With two expansion sides and a third side doing a pretty good job of imitating one, it’s possible that if we’re seeing more blowouts that it’s only temporary.
But as we’ve seen at stages this year, it isn’t always a good side smacking a bad side. By the same token, a close game doesn’t necessarily mean a high quality game.
Blowout games can be a good watch on occasion, but for the most part a game that ends within a kick or two is more likely to be entertaining than one which is decided by 10 goals.
For the purposes of this analysis, lets classify a ‘blowout’ as anything more than a ten-goal margin at the end of the game. And we’ll just look at the past decade’s worth of match results, as there’s been a pretty consistent scoring rate of around 90-100 points per side per game in the past 10 years.
What’s the benchmark?
The average margin over the course of the past 11 regular seasons (2003 to 2013) is 35.1 points, with a standard deviation of 26.7 points. Remember that this means we can expect two thirds of matches to fall between a range of 8.4 points and 61.8 points – between a close game and a blowout. And, surprise surprise, AFL game margins are normally distributed.
If our benchmark for a blowout is a ten-goal or more margin, the results show that 18.3 per cent of AFL regular season matches – a bit under one in five – end in a blowout. If we break it down into 12-point ranges, we get a fairly neat looking curve:
Something that strikes me in these figures is that more than one in five games (22.3 per cent, to be exact) end within a two-goal margin. These are games I’d call “close”, particularly these days with the increasing speed with which teams are able to move the ball across the ground to create scoring opportunities. Please don’t remind me of West Coast’s capitulation to an awful Carlton side last weekend…
But what these figures certainly show is that there’s always been some games across an AFL season which end in a blowout margin. There’s even been a reasonably regular rate of games which finish up with 20-goal margins. The stats say we can expect two of these per year.
Another interesting factoid: in 2009 and 2010, there were no games with 20-goal margins.
How does this compare to what we’ve seen so far in 2014?
That’s an ugly looking curve.
There have been slightly more blowouts at every margin bracket so far in 2014, meaning some 25 per cent of games have ended up with margins of 10 goals or more. This compares very unfavourably to the past decade, where 19 per cent of matches have blown out. It is, in fact, the second worst year, with expansion-rich 2012 the only year to see more floggings (26 per cent of games).
What does this mean in practise? If this share of games were to hold for the rest of the season, fans would expect to sit through an extra 11 big margin games – 47 compared to the 36 you’d expect based on a typical season of the past 10 years.
But that’s not even the worst area of the curve.
Take a look at the games of less than four goals. So far we’ve been treated to 13 tight finishes (two goals or less as the margin) and a further 11 between two and four goals – 38 per cent of games. The next bracket (four-six goals) is also below the curve. All told, we’ve seen precisely half of all games end in a margin of six goals or less, which is around eight percentage points fewer than the average.
Again, what does this mean? Over an average season with 198 games we’d normally expect to see 116 matches in this range, but we’re on track for just 95. That works out to one fewer per round.
Where have all of these games gone? Other than the increased number of blowouts, there’s also been a peculiar increase in games that are neither blowouts nor close. Let’s call them middling games, which could be defined as those games which have margins greater than four goals but less than ten.
All up, there’s been a slight increase in these – 48 per cent of games have gone into this range, compared to 45 per cent over the past decade.
On balance, the 2014 data says we’ve so far seen less close games, slightly more middling games, and more blowouts.
As a final point of interest, let’s see which season has been the best in terms of tight winning margins. Can’t make out the spaghetti soup? Don’t blame you.
The stats show 2003 was the ‘best’ season from a margin of victory perspective – if my view of the world is typical, anyway.
In 2003, 43.5 per cent of matches ended up with a margin of less than four goals, around two percentage points more than the average over the past decade. There were also substantially more ‘mid-range’ margins, meaning that 86 per cent of games didn’t meet the blowout 10-goal margin benchmark compared to 81 for all games over the period.
The 2009 season was a very close second, with a whole bunch of games within the 13-to-24-point bracket (24.1 per cent, compared to 19 per cent for all games). As I showed above, this year also had no games that ended with a 20-goal margin.
The worst seasons were 2011 and 2012, with around a quarter of games over these two years having margins of ten goals or more. These were the two years where new sides entered the competition, so there’s a bit of an excuse there.
There have been some brilliant games so far this year – Carlton-West Coast obviously, but North-Port, Hawks-Bombers and Bulldogs-Crows also come to mind – but also some shockers. With GWS now in their third season, Gold Coast in their fourth, and Melbourne even managing to jag a couple of close ones, we can only hope that the first seven rounds of the season are just an aberration.
