sue

The 'so what' is as I said - if you are running a business and you know that the best model has say 14 teams, you might be tempted to do things to move away from what you historically inherited. You say there is no evidence they would want to axe Vic clubs; I have friends who were Fitzroy and South Melb supporters. Yes, that was a while ago, but I wish I shared your confidence that it won't happen in future. The AFL empire builders will do whatever it takes to expand and consolidate their empire.

The fact that I didn't specifically exclude the MFC from being a weak club is nitpicking after I explained why we were not weak in a very special way in my reply to you. You go on to make the same arguments again. But why do you think the AFL is wedded to 9 games per week other than under the current contracts. Of course if they were planning to axe any particular clubs, they'd keep them afloat until that contract was up or could be breached without consequences. Sure, having many clubs "drives attendances, memberships" etc, but I doubt if a business called the AFL was set up from scratch today, there would be so many Vic clubs - doesn't sound an efficient business model to me. If I ran the AFL, I'd be always on the lookout to rationalise my business and approach the ideal model. I admit my view may be seriously misguided since I can't eavesdrop on AFL heavies' meetings. We are both speculating. Perhaps your view is misguided instead of mine.

Your argument assumes that I was suggesting that it is the MFC that is in the firing line of the AFL. I wasn't. Of all weak Vic clubs that the AFL would want to remove, we are not it. On the contrary, I suspect we are fortunately a special case because of the foundation nature and early establishment of our club worldwide and the kudos that gives the AFL, so I'm not surprised that they would help us as they did. But I believe that the AFL would be a lot happier with fewer clubs in Victoria and will clobber one or two of the weaker ones when the opportunity arises while doing all it can to protect its valuable assets (ie. a big club like EFC in trouble).

The AFL will do whatever it takes and if that means screwing the weak Vic clubs they will. What probability would you put on Essendon having been merged with GC around now if they weren't such a rich club. Otherwise I doubt if the AFL could have resisted the temptation presented by Essendon's 'problems' of reducing the number of Vic teams and bolstering a QLD team.

Interesting that one of the fundamental points he made was to pick the best team every week. Surely he didn't do that at MFC but looked to developing for the future.

On TV by any chance?

At long last, McLachlan used the word "incredibly" in its original sense. http://www.afl.com.au/news/2016-08-31/whitfield-investigation-incredibly-forensic-says-mclachlan

Your focus on the magic number of 50% and now mentioning 'compensation' passes shows your thinking is dominated by your experience at school. You think getting half the questions right in a maths exam is a pass and extend it to footy. But don't you see that even when schools choose 50% as the 'pass' mark, it is an arbitrary measure of success in maths. For someone aspiring to a career in astrophysics, 50% in maths is a fail. For someone who was previously totally innumerate it may be a great success. Titan-U's post 173 gets it right.

Depends on your definition of pass and how much more improvement you want before you give the season a pass. Calling 50% wins a pass is arbitrary - if a team won every game in the first half of the season and lost every games for the rest of the year, I wouldn't be calling it a pass - ask any North supporter. If our goal was to have a chance of playing finals come the last 2 rounds, I think we scored a pass, in fact a surprising high distinction which probably doesn't really reflect the true extent of our progress. If our goal was never losing to crap teams, then we scored a fail. I expect if we had beaten Carlton most would give us a pass without hesitation. The last 2 games ......aaarrrggghhh to quote Charlie Brown.

I am totally amazed that this simple 'investigation' has taken so long. Wait...., no I'm not. It's the Australian Fudge League standard practice.

But even if he could learn to type quicker who in the top 22 posters would he replace?

Following that logic, we'd have a list of only 22.

the right thing done http://www.afl.com.au/news/2016-08-26/demons-keep-the-faith-with-jack-trengoves-new-deal

I'd love to know why the difference.

Because any decent sporting peak body would not applaud the return of players banned for drug cheating, but give it a low profile. What would it say to WADA and the world to be seen to be celebrating their return as if the club was a poor hard done by victim? I can only hope that other clean sporting bodies in Australia lean on the AFL to stop this madness. If you love this match to go down because it may put $ in the hands of the MFC or whatever, think again. There are more important considerations.

Well quite is quite flexible. I was really responding to those who thought that we if got ahead of North tomorrow, then all we have to do is beat Geelong. The 40 to 41 result is admittedly unlikely, so pick a more likely close result, eg 80 to 81 and do the sums. Same result. I'm sure fireinthebelly could draw up a table to cover all cases.

It isn't that unlikely - look at the example in post #366. And if you choose more likely outcomes for the match vs Carlton it becomes more likely (though probability decreases for more likely outcomes of North vs GWS), it is still quite possible.

Exactly. Basic algebra.

Conclusion is true, but I go further and say that for extremely high scores your percentage can go down even if you win. Let's say we beat Carlton 51 to 1, then our percentage after tomorrow is 107.6. Then we beat Geelong by 120 to 119. Total for =(1893+120) total against =(1759+119), so percentage becomes (1893+120) / (1759+119) = 107.2 It's gone down (!) and we miss the finals unless North's falls even further. But if they lose by 1 point in a low scoring match say 40 points to 41, then their % becomes 1.074. I have used an extreme example for the Carlton match, but it will hold even truer for the other scorelines above. It is possible to have the same % as North tomorrow or better, and also beat Geelong and we still don't get into the finals. We need to win big in low scoring matches and we want North to lose big in high scoring matches.

I don't think that is right. North can lose without their percentage falling much (eg lose 2 points to 1 point). But if we beat Geelong by 1 point in a high scoring game, then our percentage goes down from wherever it is after tomorrow. Percentage can go down even if you win. You will have noticed this in round 2 of most seasons. The team that is on top after round 1 finds it's percentage heading down even when it WINS the next week. Edit to fix lose to WIN

No. If GWS win by a point 2 points to 1, North's % hardly changes. If they win by the same margin but the scores are 10001 points to 10000 (to take an extreme case to illustrate the point), then North's % becomes close to 100 because that high scoring game dominates their previously accumulated overall for and against.

I think this is correct: If North loses next week their percentage has to then be worse than 107.6. If x=points we score in the next 2 games and y is total points scored against us in both games, then for our percentage to be better than a losing North's: x has to be greater than 50+1.0762*y This is the worst case because if North lose their percentage goes down and if they don't lose % is irrelevant. A large margin would be nice of course, but if North lose in a high scoring game, their percentage will head down much more than if they lose in a low scoring game. So we want GWS to win in a high scoring game. The margin can be smaller as long as the scores are high. Edit to add: It is not enough to just surpass North's current % tomorrow. If we do and then beat Geelong by 10001 points to 10000 our % will head towards 100.

I'm implying that Roos may have put his own 'glory' second to building the team for the future.

While that might be true, the evidence is that they aren't focussed on finals. Especially when you consider that it is likely Roos would kill to get us into the finals to cement his place as a footy miracle worker. Whereas getting a bit more knowledge for 2017 does little for his reputation (public reputation at least).

Well of course this is very crude and a bit silly, but if the results go our way this weekend (with necessary % changes), we'd have to re-assess. But with what little we know now (especially me, since I don't know enough about the ladder to know if Geelong will have any desperate need to beat us), I'd say 1/3 for beating Geelong is optimistic, and sticking with 1/2 for North losing, so 16% sounds good. All a damn sight better odds than any year in recent history. And better than the odds any of us would have given 6 weeks ago I suspect.