AFL Round 11

We're entering our deep slide era...

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

A bit of a good news/bad news situation.

Bad News

The bad news is that we had ourselves another miserable week and those are becoming a little too frequent! Will this weekly newsletter turn into my incoherent ramblings as I slip further into debt and delirium? Quite possibly! I missed on both of my ML plays and the losing sides managed to narrowly avoid covering their spreads as well. That’s what I get for being greedy I suppose. Then the total I played fell apart with a quiet second half, and to top it all off, our ML parlay soared through the first two legs only to inevitably fall apart on the last leg.

In short, it was a bad week to tail.

Good News

But there’s good news. There’s always good news! You may notice this is hitting your inboxes a little later than usual this week. Part of that was me needing some time to recover from that gut punch of a betting week, but at least half of the reason was I figured out my own ELO ratings for the whole league! So that’s fun.

If you’re unfamiliar with ELO ratings, it’s a rating system that determines how much better one team is than another by weighting victories and losses by margin of victory. For example, say the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Jacksonville Jaguars by 3 touchdowns. That’s not as significant as if they were to beat the Philadelphia Eagles by 3 touchdowns. So ELO takes the skill level of the opponent and the margin of victory into account to determine overall rankings with a numeric value. That numeric value can then be used to project scoring margins against future opponents, aka spreads.

And that’s where I am today. Admittedly, I haven’t dialed this in to determine a reasonable spread and I’m not even certain this is going to be fruitful in the long run, but screw it, let’s see if I stumbled upon something useful here.

ELO Ratings

Collingwood 1824.50
Gold Coast 1757.63
Hawthorn 1755.11
Geelong 1739.01
Adelaide 1687.40
Western 1641.76
Brisbane 1681.24
Fremantle 1534.16
GWS 1491.53
Carlton 1447.16
Essendon 1424.06
Sydney 1419.03
St. Kilda 1367.91
Port Adelaide 1365.61
Melbourne 1354.47
North Melbourne 1227.87
Richmond 1198.80
West Coast 1082.75

I swear, I’ve got some plays at the end of this, it’ll be worth it.

Boring ELO Explainer

So the question then is what do you do with these numbers? For one, you can look at these rankings and gauge how much better a team is than their opponent. You can look at futures like which teams will make the playoffs (the top 8) and bet on a team like Fremantle to make the 8, or you might be able to bet on a team like Brisbane (currently 2nd in the standings) to finish outside the top 4.

But you can also subtract one team’s rating from another’s and then divide that by how many ELO ratings points translate to real, scored points. That’s determined through average scores and that’s the part I’m sorting out, but I’m starting with a value of 8.67. So Essendon hosts Richmond tomorrow morning. Essendon’s ELO is 1424.06 and Richmond’s is 1198.80. Subtract the two and divide by 8.67 and you get 25.98. That’s how many points, in theory, Essendon should be favored over Richmond on a neutral field. The current spread is Essendon favored by 20.5. And since historically they haven’t faired very well at home, this is a fairly good approximation.

Give Me The Picks Already!

Alright, let’s put this new metric to the test. These are the plays where ELO ratings determine there’s value.

Essendon -20.5 vs Richmond
GWS +4.5 at Carlton
Collingwood -32.5 at North Melbourne
Adelaide -50.5 vs West Coast
Sydney -1.5 at Melbourne
Gold Coast -12.5 at St. Kilda

We’ll leave the totals alone for the week.

And here’s another ML parlay for being good sports and humoring me.

2 leg parlay at -104:
Essendon -325, Gold Coast -200

Step up to +129:
Collingwood -600

Step up to +205:
Fremantle -300

Alright. That’s it. Good luck!