Geelong are once again on top of our team ratings thanks to a strong performance over the Bulldogs. Also contributing was a pretty poor effort by GWS against a very spirited Essendon. That game may have denied us the sort of hilarious record-breaking scores we were predicting last week, but instead it gave us a pretty cracking contest.
Melbourne and Port Adelaide both drift further back from the top 8 in strength ratings as their respective losses were widely stated to have just about sealed up the top 8’s members for the year. To see those ladder probabilities visualised, we highly recommend the FootyMaths Institute’s SWARMS system which has been calling the end of hope for both sides for weeks now.
Meanwhile the Dockers have won three in a row and now look like they’re playing up to the level we’ve been rating them at for most of the year, ie better than at least four or five other sides.
Sydney’s defence rating continues to build after a conditions-aided shutdown of Melbourne in the slop. Defensive ratings tell us how good a team is at preventing inside-50s from becoming scores, and the ratings continue to tell us that the current edition of the Swans has been better at this relative to the competition than every past defensive giant of the modern era. Some of that is aided by having played four games in heavy rain but that isn’t the whole picture as they’ve done similar things to a number of teams in the dry as well. The worry for the Swans continues to be their inefficiency in their own 50 metre arc which is slipping below that of any recent past premier.
The other thing to note here is small movements in ratings by teams who had the bye, thanks to re-estimation of the opponents they’ve played so far. The movements aren’t large but they reflect that we’re still weighting these ratings by how strong the opposing offensive/defensive/midfield lines of each opponent set has been.
Here’s the full set of tables:
Finally, here’s another check in with the plots of these ratings. The upper right quadrant is teams that are above average on both measures depicted:
