Half of the 2016 AFL season is in the book, so with just 99 games of home-and-away football ahead, who is set to rise, and who is set to fall, as we stampede towards September?

This is a follow-up column to my annual look at the league by the numbers ahead of the season.

As a reminder, what we’re doing here is putting on our Spock ears and being cold and calculating – and perhaps a little callous at various points.

The numbers presented in the tables below are the unspoken truths of professional Australian rules football; you can only outperform the math for so long.

So without delay, here is a look at the teams set to rise, and the teams set to fall, in the second half of 2016, by the numbers.

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Pythagorean wins
First cab off the rank is my old favourite: Pythagorean wins. These numbers look at what would happen if a team were to be assigned wins based solely on its offensive and defensive abilities. It is an excellent indicator of whether teams are on short-run bursts or are more sustainably ‘good’.

With that in mind, look away now Carlton and North Melbourne fans.

North Melbourne knockers, here is the number you’ve been looking for. Sort of.

The Roos have outperformed their Pythagorean expected wins tally by 1.7 wins so far this year – a 10-1 record would likely be an 8-3 record if the season was played over and over and over again. The good news though, is that despite their outperformance, North have still managed to accumulate the fifth-most Pythagorean wins in the first 11 games of the year.

Another team that has outperformed is Hawthorn, who have only earned themselves 6.3 wins to start the year – 1.7 more than their 8-3 record. This is an unfamiliar position for the Hawks, who last year underperformed their tally by 3.4 despite a 16-6 record. Indeed, they actually sit ninth on the total Pythagorean wins leader board, with Port Adelaide (currently ninth on the league ladder) inside the top eight. Should Hawks fans be starting to get a little nervous about their team’s chances?

There’s a common reason the Hawks and Roos have managed to outperform their Pythagorean wins so far, though, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Another team that has significantly outperformed is Gold Coast, whose 3-0, 0-8 start is more in keeping with a team that should be on between one and two wins (1.7) for the year. Projected forward, it suggests the Suns might not win a game for the rest of 2016. Ouch.

But the biggest outperformer of all are my dear friends at Carlton, who are a whopping 2.4 wins above their Pythagorean total in the first 11 rounds of the year. Their 6-5 record would be something closer to 4-7, or even as low as 3-8, if we replayed the first half of 2016 again.

Still, Carlton are the 12th best team in the league on this metric, which is significantly better than they were almost universally predicted to be this season. It does point to a difficult second half of the year for them, and doubly so given their schedule gets a bit tougher too.

I’m planning on spending plenty of time with the Blues next week, to try and unpack what’s made them such a surprise packet to start the year. As Cam Rose and I discuss on this week’s Roar AFL Podcast, there are up to four finals-shaping games this weekend that’ll command attention.

There’s also been a number of underperformers, although almost all of them to a lesser extent than the four teams above have outperformed their potential in the first half of the year.

Chief among these are Port Adelaide, who’ve rediscovered their mojo and earned themselves a handy 6.6 Pythagorean wins to start the year. That’s 1.6 more than their actual win total of five, and is largely driven by their improvement over the last four weeks.

Port have delivered the third-best Offensive Efficiency Rating in the league in the past four weeks, and their defence has tightened up significantly. Indeed, their total Efficiency Rating is third in the competition, behind West Coast – who funnily enough beat Port in this stretch – and Adelaide.

They’re behind the ledger now, though, and it’ll be tough to make it into September given they’ve already amassed six losses. Still, it’s not impossible, and a team that looked at risk of outright collapse six weeks into the year is looking far more steady at the halfway mark.

Fremantle, Greater Western Sydney and West Coast have all underperformed their Pyathagorean win total to start the year by a similar mark. The Dockers are still a bottom-four team on this measure, but they’re about a win better than the clear three worst sides in Essendon (0.9 Pythagorean wins), Brisbane (1.1) and Gold Coast (1.7). Greater Western Sydney and West Coast’s underperformance is almost certainly to do with their respective home-and-away records – both sides have run the slate at home, and been more middling when travelling.

Close wins and losses
There have been just 17 games decided by 12 points or less so far this year, which if maintained in the second half of the year would be the fewest (34) close games since at least the turn of the century (the point at which I cut most of my numbers off). Last year there were 43 games over the course of the season, and the year before that a remarkable 52 games – or more than a quarter of the season – were decided by two straight kicks or less.

That’s important, because it means that we’re potentially in for more of them in the second half of the year, and the fact there hasn’t been a lot of close games means the influence of this on a team’s record is somewhat limited.

As a reminder, almost every side in professional team sports around the world have a roughly 50-50 split of close wins and close losses over the long run; the AFL is no exception. So if a team is winning a heap of its close games, then the Angel of Mean Regression lurks just around the corner.

Who’s winning the close games so far this year?

The Hawks and North have won a disproportionate number of close games, each with a 100 per cent record in the three close encounters they’ve partaken in. As above, that goes a long way to explaining how they’ve outperformed their Pythagorean expected wins in their first 11.

You can’t take wins off the board, and so that both sides have managed to sneak home more frequently than you’d expect on average means they’ve banked those extra six points.

For the Hawks, that will come in handy as they chase a top-four spot – the last time they didn’t make the top four was 2010 – in their final 11 games. And for North, well it means that as they face what is by far the toughest schedule in the second half of the year, they’ve also got those extra couple of wins in their back pocket.

The rest of these numbers are quite bland. The Giants have lost both of their close games (both away from home, too), Gold Coast and Essendon are yet to play in a close game, and those freaking Geelong Cats have kept their impossible streak of close games alive – they’ve not lost a close one since Round 7, 2014 which is more than two years ago, people.

Hey, I said most teams can’t fight off the maths forever.

Blow out wins and losses
Teams that are able to consistently blow out their opponents – win games by the AFL average margin plus one standard deviation – tend to be the best teams. The same logic applies in reverse – if you regularly get the snot kicked out of you, you’re not very good at football on average, too.

For example, last year Hawthorn and West Coast had the most blowout wins, at six and five respectively, and failed to be blown out at all during the home-and-away season. By contrast, Brisbane and Carlton, who finished 17th and 18th, were blown out six times each, and didn’t smash anyone. The average over a full season is two of each per team.

What’s remarkable about this year is that a number of teams are already well on their way to eclipsing their full season marks from the year prior.

You’re reading that right: Brisbane, Essendon and Gold Coast have already been blown out five times in their 11 games. West Coast, by contrast, have already blown their opponents out five times – in all but one of their games at Subiaco, they’ve beaten their opponent by ten goals or more.

The other team well on their way to a very strong year of demolition jobs are the Giants, who’ve destroyed three opponents (Hawthorn, Port Adelaide and Gold Coast) in the first half. Like the Eagles, they’ve all come at home, as have 23 of the 26 Mortal Kombat fatalities executed so far.

Schedule change
Finally, here’s a view on how each team’s run home looks at a high level. This table shows how a team’s average opponent Pythagorean win percentage from the first half of the year compares to the second half – it’s a way of showing how the strength of a slate looks on the run home, relative to what a team has seen up to this point.

It’s better than looking at actual wins and losses, for the same reason that Pythagorean win totals are better than actual wins when we’re projecting forwards.

So who has the best run home?

It’s the Giants, who play opponents with an average winning percentage of just 40.5 per cent – by far the lowest of the current top eight. Greater Western Sydney face Sydney this weekend – in what might be a match between the two best sides in the competition, more on that in a moment – but then they face the following:

Essendon (A)
Carlton (H)
Collingwood (H)
Brisbane (A)
Port Adelaide (A)
Richmond (H)
Gold Coast (A)
West Coast Eagles (H)
Fremantle (H)
North Melbourne (A)

Given North Melbourne will probably rest half of their side in Round 23, I mean, do they lose any of those games? Port Adelaide away looks tough again all of a sudden, but otherwise the Giants play against what are ostensibly seven of the eight worst sides in the competition.

Let’s give them all of those seven, and two points for each of the more difficult-to-call games against Sydney, Port Adelaide and North. That takes the Giants to 62 points, which given the evenness of this season at the pointy end is almost certainly enough for a top-four finish.

The Giants are coming, everyone.

North Melbourne, by contrast, can be expected to see a huge lift in their schedule difficulty in the second half of the year. The Roos played a schedule as powder-puff as the Giants have on the run home, but will face an average winning percentage of 64 per cent in their last 11. That’s gigantic. Fortunately, as we’ve learnt, North banking ten wins is going to help them hang on for dear life as regression kicks in.

The going is also going to get tough for Fremantle, who’ve got another derby and match-ups against Geelong, Sydney, the Giants and the Dogs to come.

Speaking of the Dogs, their run home is looking quite nice, particularly in the final four weeks of the year (three games at Etihad, and North as their only top-eight match-up). They’ll be primed for an assault on the flag.

That’ll do for now. There’s plenty of information here, and we’ve only scratched the surface of it. Let’s continue the discussion in the comments.

To finish, I present to you the final strength of schedule ladder for the first half of the year. This table looks at how a team has performed, and adjusts their scoring and ability to stop sides scoring for the strength or otherwise of their opponents.

Where the unadjusted percentage ladder suggests there’s a logjam of teams with a percentage of between 125 – which is very good – and 135, when adjusted for schedule strength, there’s a clear leader.

It means this weekend’s Sunday twilight game can be called a top-of-the-table clash, and the stakes are certainly worthy of that status. The Battle of the Bridge headlines a superb weekend of football, with plenty on the line across the weekend – both at the top and near the bottom.

What a way to start the second half of the season.