Well, the season is over, trade period has ended, the draft is a ways off... time for some wild and pointless speculation. About time for my annual post as well, so...
So, I was having a chat with a mate last night in a little pub in Melbourne about statistical analysis in AFL football. As you do. He was arguing that the AFL is decades behind the rest of the world when it comes to using statistical analysis in sports. My question was: how do you know? It always seems to me that the clubs jealously guard their analytics and methods and, shirley... SURELY these massive multimillion dollar organisations (that have massive multimillion dollar financial swings based on on-field performance) are doing all that can be done. But if there's a moneyball style shift to be made to grab an advantage in the AFL system, then where is it going to come from? How do we get it done?
Some thoughts;
i. Over trade period we all develop some strong opinions about which players are OVERvalued and which players are UNDERVALUED. And surely moneyball was all about using statistical analysis to target UNDERvalued players. So how do you find the undervalued? is it about smart positional acquisitions (eg. grab the tall forward that you need from the club with too many tall forwards), is it about grabbing underpaid players from clubs with bursting salarycaps (eg. grab the 5th best midfielder in the comp, that happens to be the 3rd best midfielder at a club and so wants more money than the club can cough up)?
Clicky for article about positional acquisitions being "moneyball"
ii. Moneyball, as a film, is predicated on a club being in such a dire position that new approaches had to be taken. It was challenging the baseball statusquo. I like to believe that AFL is developing gradually and won't require this. My bitter anger at the financial focus of the Steve's that crushed the core of our club is a symptom of this kind of growth, though one look at the AFL media shows how much of a dated boys-club the sport can be. So where do the new ideas come from?
Clicky for some speculation after Emma Quayle's move to the Giants
iii. Is sabermetric analysis even practical for a sport like AFL. baseball is a simple, stop-start games with some easily identifiable and recordable outcomes. The shift of that kind of statistical analysis even into Basketball and soccor has been incredibly slow, inconsistent and has yet to show decent results. And AFL is more complex again - anyone that's played an AFL computer game and compared it to a FIFA game of the same era has seen the problem (yes, the AFL games have lacked the funding, but the broader problem of trying to program all of the mechanics of an AFL game, and the complex decisions that an AFL player routinely makes is the bigger problem).
clicky for some vague waffle about those GPS vests and analytics in the US
iv. If there was ever a team that looked like it was Moneyball'd to the top of the ladder is was Ross Lyon's St Kilda. Seriously. A rag-tag bunch of athletes drilled into a defensive, quick transitioning machine. But it couldn't win a premiership. Just like the Oakland As in the aforementioned film, statistical analysis seems to deliver a very high chance of success but can't guarantee success on a given day (ie. the first week in October... yeah, that just doesn't sound right...) So is a Moneyball approach worthwhile? (my two cents: mathing a team to the top of the ladder and rolling a dice on the premiership sounds more fun than footballing a team into a premiership mould and rolling a dice that they make the finals.)
clicky for Ross Lyon on Moneyball (third party)
v. If you've made it this far into this mammoth post then you deserve a reward.
clicky for some pictures of Lauchie Neale 