Watson11

Agree. If you want to look to a premiership team with a forgettable forward line the eagles in 2006 were full of poor to average. But dominant mids and strong defence got them a flag.

http://m.afl.com.au/news/2019-01-05/who-has-the-best-forwards-we-rank-every-club Not sure how they worked out our 2018 average scoring as follows 2299/22=94 (instead of 104.5).

I would have Harmes breakout season in front of the other 9. I suspect Joel Selwood, Rory Sloane, and Josh Kelly agree with me.

Infinity should step up to be the BOJ sponsor? Roy Morgan produce research each year about car sponsorship of AFL, as the automakers get good ROI from it. Seems cheap for a car manufacturer to not be a major sponsor. If Infinity don’t want it then Pert has history signing sponsorships with car manufacturers.

If Tmac/Weids are injured, the next key forward will be a role player and we’ll be looking for goals elsewhere. The role will be to provide a contest, bring the ball to ground, tackle, pressure, etc. Those stats are the stats Goody would be interested in, not the fact Pedersen averaged 2 goals a game at Casey. Smith averaged 6 tackles a game in his limited opportunities.

Yes thats wrong. We were 79.5 points against including finals. Not sure how journos can be so clueless. There were 4 of them writing this article.

Where would Perty find all of those ex members. I suspect he would be doing the rounds of aged care facilities followed by cemetery’s for most of them ?

For unknown reasons, players that do an ACL at less than 18 are a very high chance of redoing the same ACL (almost 40%). Maybe the fact they are still growing makes it weak. The second ACL injury repair is usually a lot stronger. So here’s hoping it is like Max who also did his first one at 17 and second at 20.

How true. If players were traded whenever they considered a move home then Gaff, Sloane, and Kelly would be playing at different clubs.

The value of a 208cm forward target in a full on pressure final was shown by Cox when he wiped Richmond in the first half of the prelim, and Gawn is 5x better than Cox. When forward Max can take big grabs, and with 10 or 11 goals enough to win a close GF a few goals from Max/Preuss when forward could be the difference. Just having Max fresh in September will be huge. I love that the footy department are just leaving nothing to chance, and don’t have the “ain’t broke don’t fix it mentality.” Even if we win every game and the flag in 2019, we should still be looking to improve.

Maybe but I’ll back Max and Preuss to lay more forward 50 tackles than Hogan did last year.

Judging by the number of photos posted in the last 4 weeks of Preuss versus May there is no way that Goody isn’t locked in on Preuss spending time forward as the 3rd tall. Hopefully it works well all season. Will be really valuable in low scoring finals.

Just like Preuss has been handcuffed to Max.

SWYL, I seem to recall you have a tv industry background. Any interaction with Pert when he was MD of channel 9 in Melbourne? @rpfc, you sound like an old melbournian upset at losing guaranteed board seats whenever you wanted them. I’m happy those days are gone. I personally think the board and Bartlett have been excellent. He was spot on when he labelled MFC soft on and off the field in his first speech 5 years ago. MFC is no longer soft in either. Everything done by MFC in the last 5 years has been about losing that soft gentlemen club tag, game style, list management, player trades. I can’t imagine prior boards approving tough decisions like trading Watts. For me the Pert appointment is just another decision where the soft option would have been an internal appointment. Only time will tell if Pert delivers which will be almost entirely measured by delivering a facility in the MCG precinct, which he is uniquely qualified to do.

Hawthorn have won 13 premierships in 50 years by being arrogant. Hawthorns leaders like Matthews, Scott, Brereton, Dipper, Lewis, Hodge etc all got suspended, all gave away 50m penalties, all could be called undisciplined. I’m happy to take the occasional “undisciplined act” to get some of that culture into Melbourne, and hope Lewis gets his 5th flag. Even if he doesn’t, he is sure helping by turning up in peak condition and showing the list what it takes to take the next step.

Geez I liked Melbourne 20 years ago. Less congestion, could afford a decent house, less crime, less traffic. Is Adelaide really that good? I’ll have to visit.

Bit rough calling Puopolo an out the back player. But your point is spot on. Forwards who can’t create turnovers are now a liability. If Jeff wants to play 22 games he doesn’t need 40 goals, he needs 100 tackles. He has never done that in a season and hasn’t been close since his first year at Melbourne. Puopolo and Rioli pretty much did it every year at Hawthorn. Jeff goes into this year a bit like Bugg went into 2018. He’s on his absolute last chance. One poor defensive game and that is his career done.

Haha. Maybe you and other Luddites can package that up and sell it to the footy department. Who knows, maybe they are predicting improvements in players based on age and games played. I wouldn’t know. Big data and machine learning is being applied everywhere whether you think it works or not. Champion data can never predict injuries, but big European and US teams are measuring every training session and game and have been applying big data and machine learning to non contact injury prevention for several years. They don’t publish much for obvious reasons, but BarcelonaFC recently published 2014 data that showed they can predict 60% of non contact injuries and thus can prevent them. I’m sure that has improved in the last 4 years. They have huge budgets and are way ahead of the AFL. Maybe this is also happening in the AFL. Point that started all of this is despite your opinion and comments on the CD list rating they have no user bias in the analysis of the data at all. It is just data and unbiased processing of it, with all of its limitations ie garbage in garbage out. I personally think it is pretty good in, pretty good out. It’s not perfect. Time to move on.

Yes after every game the model is updated with those stats and the result. Because the model is based on many years of data, each game only changes it a small amount. The player ratings change far more after each game, as they are based on only 2 years and weighted to the most recent. The intent of all of this data is simply to make CD lots of money, because the professional clubs pay big $ for it. The professional clubs pay for it because it gives them unbiased insights into what the really important stats are that give teams an edge. Watch Moneyball if you have not seen it. It's where all this data stuff really started. Clarkson was the first in the AFL to use data and built his 4x premiership list using it.

One on one loss stats for 2018 are below showing the top 20 ranked key position defenders. Name 2018 Career Will Schofield 15.1% 19.9% Jake Lever 15.4% 30.6% Harry Taylor 16.7% 15.4% Lachie Henderson 16.7% 22.8% Sam Frost 17.6% 26.7% James Frawley 18.4% 25.0% Alex Keith 18.5% 32.8% Daniel Tahlia 18.9% 20.5% Heath Grundy 20.3% 22.6% Steven May 21.4% 23.2% Robbie Tarrant 21.7% 27.8% Scott Thompson 23.5% 26.7% Tom Jonas 23.6% 24.3% Alex Rance 25.0% 21.3% Phil Davis 25.3% 31.1% Lynden Dunn 26.1% 22.4% Oscar McDonald 26.7% 25.1% David Astbury 27.5% 24.7% Jeremy McGovern 27.6% 19.4% Jake Carlisle 27.6% 24.6% Michael Hurley 27.6% 29.1%

Can't predict injuries, modified game plans, improvements in players or teams, poor form or loss of confidence. So no one knows for sure what will happen in round 1 next year let alone the entire season. Where they are good is when the siren goes at the end of our round 1 game, you could put the stats into one of these models and it would predict the winner with 99% accuracy. We just can't predict what those stats will be before the game with any certainty. All this tells us is based on the data we have a very, very good list.

You are correct in that humans at the moment record the stats (and need to decide what is a 1%er, tap to advantage, effective kick etc). But no human decides how to weight the various stats. When you train these systems, you start with all the stats as inputs, and you know the result the model needs to give for each game (Team A won by X points). The system repeatably adjusts parameters (weights) until it gets the correct answer, and repeats that for every game in its database. What you end up with is a model that given a set of input stats will predict the result, and that is simply how the lists are ranked. I

Nope that's wrong. They just put all the data in and train the model. The training of the model weights the stats. Not a human. Then they put the stats of each list in and put that into the model to weight the list. It's just data. As was made clear it can't account for everything and is imperfect, but there is no assumptions put in.

Not sure who says we have had the best defence by a country mile. But definitely have never agreed with your view that the problem has been that our key defenders are hopeless one on one defenders.

CD just uses data and they make no assumptions. They use machine learning, specifically a convolutional neural network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolutional_neural_network). Consider it a "brain" that has no pre-concieved assumptions but hundred of millions of ways to combine information. They just train the network on the data they have (well over 20 years of comprehensive data), putting in the stats for each game and the result. The limitation is the stats don't cover everything, as that is impossible to do, and they don't take into account things like injuries, the draw, player improvements etc. They do measure a lot though. The list is just a ranking based on this information and simply tells us in an unbiased way that we have a very very good list. As Prodee says though the premier can come out of any of the top 10 teams on that list.