Sometimes you become acutely aware that something you are doing is objectively odd.
Once I went through the checkout at Woollies with several blocks of chocolate and potato chips and little else. The cashier looked upon my haul and remarked I must’ve been having a party. I laughed in agreement.
I was not having a party.
I’ve had a similar feeling over the past few weeks as I wondered when it was safe to start talking about the football again, and by ‘safe’ I mean socially acceptable to people who don’t devote a single second of their time to wondering when it is safe to talk about football again.
Pondering this is odd. Perhaps I was tired of contemplating this when I arbitrarily decided there was no better time than now. The annual AFL trade period hope-a-palooza has long passed and the AFLW season remains weeks away. Why not smack bang in the middle of the turgid AFL offseason?
Armed with my flimsy justification and acute footballing withdrawal, I thought I would spend some of the holiday season trying to decipher what exactly football is.
Now I’m no David King. I possess no stats lab. I’ve not calculated a premiership trapezoid for you. But I have attempted to distil Aussie Rules football into a very basic idea – one I hope will prove insightful, though I’d settle for moderately interesting.
I posit that football is a game of opportunities and execution. How many opportunities did a team create? How many did they give their opposition? Did they execute once they created an opportunity? Do they let opponents maximise their opportunities?
If we accept this premise, then we can reasonably easily compare teams across these measures. An opportunity can broadly be defined as any time you enter your attacking 50 – after all, this is where most of the scoring is done. How often you hit the scoreboard shows how efficient you are at executing those opportunities, and that efficiency can be refined even further if we measure how often a scoring shot amounted to six points. The same is true of defence.
These measures make for interesting reading for season 2017. I’ve noted some observations that stood out to me, and hopefully you might find others of interest to you.
Attack (higher is better) | How many opportunities did they create? | How often did their opportunities turn into scores? | How often did they maximise their opportunities? | |||||||||
Team | Games | Total Inside 50s Earned | # per game | Rank | Total Scoring Shots | % of inside 50s = scoring shots | Rank | Total Goals | % of inside 50s = goals | Rank | % of scoring shots = goals | Rank |
(1) Adelaide | 25 | 1437 | 57.48 | 2nd | 720 | 50.10 | 2nd | 395 | 27.49 | 1st | 54.86 | 4th |
(2) Geelong | 25 | 1324 | 52.96 | 8th | 632 | 47.73 | 6th | 343 | 25.91 | 7th | 54.27 | 8th |
(3) Richmond | 25 | 1396 | 55.84 | 3rd | 639 | 45.77 | 14th | 331 | 23.71 | 12th | 51.80 | 13th |
(4) GWS | 25 | 1359 | 54.36 | 7th | 641 | 47.17 | 7th | 336 | 24.72 | 10th | 52.42 | 12th |
(5) Port Adelaide | 23 | 1363 | 59.26 | 1st | 629 | 46.15 | 12th | 323 | 23.70 | 13th | 51.35 | 14th |
(6) Sydney | 24 | 1263 | 52.63 | 11th | 608 | 48.14 | 5th | 329 | 26.05 | 5th | 54.11 | 9th |
(7) Essendon | 23 | 1182 | 51.39 | 12th | 596 | 50.42 | 1st | 319 | 26.99 | 3rd | 53.52 | 10th |
(8) West Coast | 24 | 1189 | 49.54 | 13th | 555 | 46.68 | 9th | 309 | 25.99 | 6th | 55.68 | 2nd |
(9) Melbourne | 22 | 1206 | 54.82 | 4th | 525 | 43.53 | 16th | 319 | 26.45 | 4th | 60.76 | 1st |
(10) Western Bulldogs | 22 | 1203 | 54.68 | 5th | 557 | 46.30 | 10th | 260 | 21.61 | 18th | 46.68 | 18th |
(11) St Kilda | 22 | 1160 | 52.73 | 10th | 570 | 49.14 | 3rd | 271 | 23.36 | 14th | 47.54 | 17th |
(12) Hawthorn | 22 | 1064 | 48.36 | 14th | 499 | 46.90 | 8th | 273 | 25.66 | 8th | 54.71 | 5th |
(13) Collingwood | 22 | 1197 | 54.41 | 6th | 554 | 46.28 | 11th | 278 | 23.22 | 15th | 50.18 | 16th |
(14) Fremantle | 22 | 1044 | 47.45 | 16th | 452 | 43.30 | 17th | 231 | 22.13 | 17th | 51.11 | 15th |
(15) North Melbourne | 22 | 1163 | 52.86 | 9th | 533 | 45.83 | 13th | 290 | 24.94 | 9th | 54.41 | 7th |
(16) Carlton | 22 | 1026 | 46.64 | 17th | 434 | 42.30 | 18th | 232 | 22.61 | 16th | 53.46 | 11th |
(17) Gold Coast | 22 | 1062 | 48.27 | 15th | 471 | 44.35 | 15th | 257 | 24.20 | 11th | 54.56 | 6th |
(18) Brisbane | 22 | 1012 | 46 | 18th | 497 | 49.11 | 4th | 276 | 27.27 | 2nd | 55.53 | 3rd |
Adelaide were an elite offence and nobody else was particularly close. They were the only side to rank top four in each category. They got the ball into attacking positions often, and when they did they tended to score, and what they scored were goals. They, along with the Bombers, were the only sides to score from more than 50 per cent of their forward entries, though the Crows broke the forward-50 barrier six more times a game on average.
Port Adelaide moved the ball inside 50 more than anyone else, but they were very inefficient once they did, finishing well below average in each of those measures. Premiers Richmond were similar.
The real surprise here is Brisbane – they are in the inverse of the premiers. They created the fewest opportunities each game, but when they did manage to create them, they were very efficient. It will be interesting to see if this holds in season 2018.
The Western Bulldogs’ campaign was extremely wasteful, almost in the top bracket for total opportunities but dead last in converting for goals. Collingwood followed a similar pattern.
Fremantle are the only side in the bottom bracket for all four categories. Carlton’s slightly better accuracy in front of goal spares them from the same fate.
Essendon were below average in terms of creating opportunities but converted them into scores at a better rate than any other team. They were slightly below average in terms of accuracy, though.
Melbourne produced a very odd mix. They got forward often (4th), but were extremely poor at turning their entries into scores (16th). When they did manage to score, they were the most accurate side in the competition.
The Giants were decidedly middle of the range in the attacking facets of the game.
Defence (lower is better) | How many opportunities did they concede? | How often did their opponents turn opportunities into scores? | How often did their opponents maximise their opportunities? | |||||||||
Team | Games | Inside 50s given up | # per game | Rank | Scoring shots given up | % of inside 50s given up = scoring shots | Rank | Total goals given up | % of inside 50s given up = goals | Rank | % of scoring shots given up = goals | Rank |
(1) Adelaide | 25 | 1258 | 50.32 | 5th | 547 | 43.48 | 3rd | 292 | 23.21 | 6th | 53.38 | 10th |
(2) Geelong | 25 | 1270 | 50.8 | 7th | 589 | 46.38 | 8th | 299 | 23.54 | 7th | 50.76 | 3rd |
(3) Richmond | 25 | 1263 | 50.52 | 6th | 531 | 42.04 | 1st | 264 | 20.90 | 1st | 49.72 | 1st |
(4) GWS | 25 | 1295 | 51.8 | 10th | 567 | 43.78 | 4th | 298 | 23.01 | 5th | 52.56 | 8th |
(5) Port Adelaide | 23 | 1125 | 48.91 | 1st | 494 | 43.91 | 5th | 251 | 22.31 | 3rd | 50.81 | 4th |
(6) Sydney | 24 | 1197 | 49.88 | 3rd | 505 | 42.19 | 2nd | 260 | 21.72 | 2nd | 51.49 | 5th |
(7) Essendon | 23 | 1240 | 53.91 | 15th | 590 | 47.58 | 12th | 307 | 24.76 | 8th | 52.03 | 6th |
(8) West Coast | 24 | 1292 | 53.83 | 14th | 584 | 45.20 | 6th | 295 | 22.83 | 4th | 50.51 | 2nd |
(9) Melbourne | 22 | 1125 | 51.14 | 8th | 534 | 47.47 | 10th | 280 | 24.89 | 9th | 52.43 | 7th |
(10) Western Bulldogs | 22 | 1091 | 49.59 | 2nd | 518 | 47.48 | 11th | 279 | 25.57 | 11th | 53.86 | 12th |
(11) St Kilda | 22 | 1146 | 52.09 | 11th | 531 | 46.34 | 7th | 291 | 25.39 | 10th | 54.80 | 16th |
(12) Hawthorn | 22 | 1126 | 51.18 | 9th | 550 | 48.85 | 14th | 301 | 26.73 | 14th | 54.73 | 15th |
(13) Collingwood | 22 | 1107 | 50.32 | 4th | 528 | 47.70 | 13th | 287 | 25.93 | 13th | 54.36 | 14th |
(14) Fremantle | 22 | 1163 | 52.86 | 12th | 575 | 49.44 | 15th | 317 | 27.26 | 16th | 55.13 | 18th |
(15) North Melbourne | 22 | 1215 | 55.23 | 16th | 609 | 50.12 | 16th | 331 | 27.24 | 15th | 54.35 | 13th |
(16) Carlton | 22 | 1165 | 52.95 | 13th | 543 | 46.61 | 9th | 299 | 25.67 | 12th | 55.06 | 17th |
(17) Gold Coast | 22 | 1233 | 56.05 | 17th | 626 | 50.77 | 17th | 337 | 27.33 | 17th | 53.83 | 11th |
(18) Brisbane | 22 | 1339 | 60.86 | 18th | 691 | 51.61 | 18th | 367 | 27.41 | 18th | 53.11 | 9th |
Richmond were the clear standouts on defence. They prevented their opponents from entering the attacking 50 at a good but not elite rate (6th), but they top the rankings across the board in snuffing those opportunities out. Their opponents’ entries turned into scores less often than any other side, and when they did score they were behinds. Richmond was the only team in the league to concede fewer goals than behinds in 2017.
Sydney are the next best defensive outfit, ranking top four in three different categories and only just missing out on the opponent accuracy measure. Their defensive efforts in the middle of the park appear superior to Richmond’s in that they let their opposition inside 50 less often, and they weren’t far behind Richmond in the other groupings.
Port Adelaide also excelled in this facet of the game. Their midfield deserves a lot of credit for their showing in 2017. Nobody controlled field position better. They got the ball into their opponents’ defensive 50 at a better rate than anyone else and also conceded the fewest entries into their own.
The Western Bulldogs’ attacking inefficiencies are replicated in defence. They were very good at preventing their opponents from getting forward, but once they did break through they often conceded. Like Port Adelaide, they controlled field position reasonably well in 2017 but were very inefficient at both ends of the ground.
West Coast’s midfield owes their defenders a drink. They were almost in the bottom tier when it came to preventing their opponents from getting forward but elite at preventing those entries becoming goals.
Brisbane and Gold Coast reside in their own defensive pits of despair. They can both be grateful their opposition wasn’t more accurate in front of goal.
Geelong had a good but not great season and were a picture of stability. Across both attack and defence, they ranked between fifth and eighth in all but one category.
Essendon and West Coast fit similar profiles – quite good and often elite in facets of the game at either end of the ground but quite poor in the middle of the park. Collingwood and the Western Bulldogs are the inverse in that they’re strong in the middle but inefficient at both ends of the ground.
Fremantle didn’t finish higher than 12th in any of the measures. Yikes.
Swanslolz
Guest
I believe swans and Geelong wasted another year after spending buckets of money .
Adam Ritchie
Roar Rookie
Thanks Ryan - that article of yours makes for interesting reading (and doubles as a trip down memory lane to a time in which clubs battled to be Hawthorn's sacrificial lamb). The observation about some of the determinations being crude due to nature of the data we have available is a good one. I considered noting that in this piece, but it was starting to get a little lengthy... Nonetheless I agree with your sentiments regarding it being a useful framework. It's interesting to note when the data affirms things you may have assumed based on the "eye test", and even more so when it reveals the unexpected.
Cat
Roar Guru
Actually it does.
Kangajets
Guest
A d I checked in here the other day and aligee was going all political. It’s got back to Aussie rules talk now . Has he been red carded ?? Bring back the gee ...
Kris
Guest
The flaw in using inside-50s is that it doesn't account for the ball coming-in and out. A team might get an inside 50 and hold it there. Have multiple opportunities from the single inside-50. Another team might get it in, see it come straight out, then get it in, then straight out. One team could be having 6 chances from a single inside 50 and another 6 changes from 6 different inside 50s. Very overrated metric the inside 50.
Ryan Buckland
Expert
Hey Adam, this is really great! You've essentially pulled apart the components of what I call a team's Offensive Efficiency Rating and Defensive Efficiency Rating - which I first put into the ether here: http://www.theroar.com.au/2015/03/17/bucking-the-trend-hawthorn-will-be-flag-favourites-again-this-season/ - except I roll them all up into one number which is then standardised against the rest of the competition in the given year. I find it a really useful framework to help keep tabs on the competition as a whole, and a useful comparitor for how teams have changed between years.
Cat
Roar Guru
I’ve mentioned it before but it’s worth repeating now; the Pies were mid table or better in almost all the measured stats, but their ladder finish was worse. That points to very poor coaching. Buckley simply does not use the players to his advantage. He wants the team to play his way rather than tailoring a game plan to suit the players he has.
Chris
Guest
I am pleased with the fact that Collingwood is hardly mentioned, if at all. What that means to us Maggies that there is room for improvement across the board and we couldn't have been any worse. That augers well for this year because I am absolutelyconvinced that all the KPIs that you have brandished above will be put to the sword.
Adam Ritchie
Roar Rookie
Sorry for the confusion here folks - the tables in my working document were colour coded, which I suspect makes reading the table much easier. AdelaideDocker is on the money with his reading though. Richmond are ranked sixth for inside 50s conceded, but 1st in the other three defensive measures (rate at which opponent scored with those inside 50s, rate at which they scored goals with those inside 50s, and their opponents were the least accurate in front of goal) Hope that helps
TomC
Roar Guru
It's possible that that's F agan long term strategy but that's yet to play out. From memory the Saints had a number of stinkers in front of goal in 2017. I'm not sure what drives it but it suggests if they can fix that part of the game they might find the extra couple of wins they need to play finals. On the other hand, I'm doubtful they can continue to rely so heavily on a fairly shallow midfield.
Liam Salter
Roar Guru
Interesting thoughts, Tom. I can't tell if it's a good thing that the Lions regularly score on the counterattack. I mean, it's poor in the sense that they're getting themselves into that position so regularly given their terrible inside-50 conceded numbers, but i guess it's a quirky testament to their defence + midfield that they can get it the other end quite well to get themselves into scoring positions? Or am I thinking about this wrong? Also, the thing that strikes me the most with the Saints is their horrifyingly poor accuracy. It shows, somewhat, here: they're decisively midrange in their forward-50 entry numbers, pretty decent in converting them into scores (49%), but awful at converting them into goals (less than half).
TomC
Roar Guru
Interesting read Adam. I like that you hold back from drawing too many sweeping conclusions. My suspicion is that my Lions look like they're quite efficient in turning inside 50s into goals because they tend to score most on the counterattack, when there's space in the forward area. That they have by far the most inside 50s conceded supports that theory. West Coast are probably up there largely due to the quality of their forwards. Melbourne's accuracy really stands out as driving their forward efficiency. It'll be interesting to see if that continues to hold. It's easy to look at these numbers and reinforce one's own existing views so I'll try to avoid that. The thing that surprised me a little was that Richmond are the most defensively efficient team. It strengthens a view I've always been sceptical of; that they were the best organised and structured team in 2017 and that's why they won the flag. I'm also a bit surprised how poor the Saints look. Their midfield would be the strongest area of the ground but I didn't think they were quite that reliant on it.
Doc Disnick
Roar Guru
To be honest, I have no idea either. I thought Cat was talking about Richmond and Sydney's respective ranking of 3rd and 6th defensively, which is actually their ladder positions at the end of the H&A season. However, Sydney finished 3rd in 'opportunities conceded', whilst Richmond finished 6th, which I later thought Cat might have been referring to, but unfortunately this makes even less sense since it's the reverse. Oh well, I've had zero sleep over the past 36 hours - time for a nap.
The Original Buzz
Guest
Interesting read, Adam. If Brisbane can create more opportunities and tighten up their defence, they will be the team to watch. Going by these stats, the Blues need to tighten up across the entire field. As much a worry as Freo. Interesting to see the defence stats are very similar to ladder position.
Liam Salter
Roar Guru
That makes me feel a bit dumb. To be fair, though: everything I say still makes sense. Sydney is ranked third for least inside 50s conceded, and Richmond is sixth (so, coincidentally the same numbers, but just swapped). That's what I assumed Cat was talking about, my bad!
Doc Disnick
Roar Guru
Scrub that last comment. I see what Cat is getting at. The table is difficult to follow.
Doc Disnick
Roar Guru
An interesting hypothesis there, AD, but I think you'll find a much simpler answer. It's their respective ladder positions at the end of the H&A season. No idea why the tables have been collated like this though.
Liam Salter
Roar Guru
They're third and sixth for conceding inside 50s, but they're very good (first and second) at limiting the amount of goals and scores that result from their opponents inside 50s. Whereas you have Port and the Bulldogs - who conceded the least amount of inside 50s - but have comparatively terrible stats for the amount of times teams are regularly scoring when they get inside inside 50s. So, you're right on that Richmond and Sydney aren't as good at limiting how many their conceding, they're good at limiting scoring opportunities from their concessions, and Port and the Bulldogs are excellent at limiting how much they concede, but not how much they limit scores from inside 50s. If that makes sense?
Cat
Roar Guru
I find your tables and narrative don't match up. For example, you mention Richmond as the best defence and Sydney as next bet but in the table they are ranked 3rd and 6th respectively. I appreciate all the work that went into collating the numbers just a bit confused.
Liam Salter
Roar Guru
Your first paragraph is frighteningly relatable to me, yikes. It's a fantastic, and very interesting, article though, Adam. It's an excellent look at the teams performance through the year, and there's more than a few surprises. I'm pleasantly surprised by Brisbane's offensive prowess - almost 50% of the time they're inside 50 they're going for a score, and 55% of the time they're getting one. That'll be pleasing news to them. The offensive performance of both Port and the Bulldogs doesn't surprise me, though. It was obvious that consistency and their attack were major issues for them, and it shows here. Collingwood and Richmond, as well. I recall mentioning in my GF live blog that it'll be Richmond's defence versus the Crows' offence, and here's some statistical proof.