BAFFU: The Best and Fairest in the 'FU. The highest honour a player can receive from our generous league. Rumour has it that the commish is even stumping up a 7-figure monetary prize for the coach of the winning player (care to confirm @JPK?), an unheard of event but not unreasonable since we all know the coach makes the player. Last year, the count was ruled by the biggest Armadillo of them all, Max Gawn. He polled 28 of a possible 51 votes for @insider's Ararat premiers. Simply incredible numbers, do we put it down to incredible coaching? With that now ancient history, and since nobody even remembers who won the premiership last year, let's move on to this year. The first post of 2018 started by noting how some things never change, and how Nutsy had yet to lose a game. Boy how things have changed in the FU this year. 6 rounds through, and guess who's unbeaten? Oh, its Nutsy and @bryzza - maybe things don't change. Anyway, onto the count. I'll give some more detailed stats in future posts as trends start to reveal themselves, so for now let's simply look at the leaderboard. Shame on anyone who doesn't own the man at the top - wait a second, that's all you readers! Suckers! Hope you've got him in SC at least. Neale is currently on track for 37 BAFFU votes, a new record, so let's see if he can keep that up. Perhaps a slight surprise in 3rd, but the evergreen Shannon seems to have found a second win. Leaderboard to round 6 (Masters Tournament piano tinkling plays as the camera pans across the creek at Hole 12 at Augusta) 13 - Lachie Neale GG 9 - Brodie Grundy NV 8 - Shannon Hurn CIS 7 - 2 players 6 - 5 players
Prize to the winning coach is AU$00,000.00 which is not only seven figures, its seven significant figures. Great work @Tomster Now remind me, who did win last years' premiership?
With the ORFFU mid-season draft flying along quicker than South Africa can choke in a World Cup, your friendly neighbourhood author has been working feverishly to produce a linguistic masterpiece that even Tolkein would be proud of. Your friendly neighbourhood author even decided to give up his pick in the draft to attempt to improve the quality of this post! However, these dreams and visions were vastly unsuccessful, so the literary triumph will have to wait for the next edition of the BAFFU wrap-up, maybe even the post-season edition. As per usual, we will examine some randomly chosen numbers and possibly attempt to draw connections before reaching the overall count, correct up to ORFFU Round 11. This post will focus on positions, for no real reason. On the topic of ORFFU round 11, what a start to the year we've had! From a 1400+ score being a losing score to Christmas Island setting new record lows, who knows what the second half of the year holds for us. I can't help but mention the current ladder leaders as well, holding off the perennially strong Ararat and Nuytsland to offer some salvation for those teams languishing near the bottom: it can turn around quickly. Some random facts and figures - Unsurprisingly, the midfielders dominate the vote scoring. Of the 594 votes awarded across the 99 games in ORFFU 2019, 256 votes or 43% of votes have been awarded to midfielders. This is despite the top 2 positions of the overall leaderboard not being midfielders! - The ruckmen and interchange bench warmers have scored a similar number of votes. In the first 5 rounds, the IC line scored 31 votes, but then could only manage 17 in the next 6 rounds to reach 48. The rucks have gone the opposite way, scoring 20 in the first 5 rounds but then 30 in the next 6 reaching 50. - The highest score of the year is the 207 scored by Stephen Coniglio in round 11. He smashed the highest score of the first 11 rounds, which only stood at 177. - The lowest score to poll votes remains 99, scored in round 1 by Banchang's Sinclair. - 140 points was only enough for 1 vote in the aforementioned round 9 clash between Ararat and Southern Cross. - Combining forwards and defenders votes polled still doesn't reach the amount of votes polled by midfielders. - 10 games of the 99 have had ties in scores for vote getters. The tie-breaker methods will not be mentioned here. There was even one game where 3 players ended on the same score and all could have received 1 vote! Anyway, now that the useful stuff is out the way I'll chuck the leaderboard down the bottom. Some slight changes from last time - Neale has been unable to keep up his hot start, dropping back from the lead, but only by 1 vote. Shannon Hurn and Neale only managed 4 votes each over the last 6 rounds - for Neale, this could be put down to playing in a good team to take votes from him; Hurn has no real excuse given Christmas Island struggle to field 10 players most weeks. For the first time in a year and a half we have a tie for the lead, between two behemoths of the competition. Gawn had an awesome 6 rounds, scoring 10 votes. 9 players now sit on 10 votes or more with 6 rounds to go. Anyone could still win, but it's beginning to look like a 3 horse race with one horse flagging badly. Leaderboard 17 - Grundy, Gawn 16 - Neale 13 - 2 players 12 - 1 player
Think the end result is obvious, but there are still some interesting take-aways from the results! Who doesn't love a random, completely useless fact or 18? Final leaderboard, team by team results and other discussion from the BAFFU 2019 to come during the ORFFU Semi-Final week
It's that time of year again - the ORFFU finals are well underway, Melbourne is bloody cold and Nuytsland and Ararat look like the teams to beat. Why does that have to happen every year? We've seen the surgence of Cow Bay and Gisborne (it wasn't a resurgence because they never were at the top); the slide of Christmas Island. Players have scored huge scores, whilst others have spent significant amounts of time on the sideline. In the end, there was one man who ruled over all others, and it is the BAFFU crown that he now wears. But, before we get to that announcement, let's go through the usual Party Mix assortment of random BAFFU-related stats. My excel skills are nowhere near as good as fresh's, and the stats nowhere near as useful, but if we aren't in this for fun then why keep reading? Without further ado, here is the Party Mix stats of the BAFFU for 2019. The Milk Bottles - the stats you know they are coming, but don't really want or need 918 votes were polled over season 2019, across 152 matches. 179 unique players gathered votes throughout the year. 27 players polled 10 or more votes; but only 4 could manage more than 20. In 2018, 4 players also polled 20+ votes but only 20 players could get more than 10 votes. The highest score for the year was 207 by Staghorn Flat's Stephen Coniglio in Round 11. Ararat were unlucky enough to be their opponents and lost. Josh Dunkley scored 202 for Korumburra against Nutsy in Round 17, but Nutsy still won. These were the only scores above 180 for the ORFFU season. 50 scores of 150+ were recorded in the Home and Away season Unlike last year, there was no game were no hundreds were scored. The lowest 3-vote score was 102, way back in Round 1, by Luke Dalhaus for Banchang against Hughenden. Meanwhile, the highest 1-vote score was 144 by Jack Billings for Gisborne in a high-scoring clash with Staghorn Flat. The Teeth - average lollies, fairly average numbers To poll 3 votes, you needed an average score of 143.22. To poll 1 vote, you needed an average score of 119.75. For 1 and 2 votes, the median scores were 120 and 127 respectively. There's not many points difference between polling 1 or 2 votes in an average game The Jelly Babies - small, inconsequential details but highly enjoyable anyway From Round 11 (the round before the byes) to Round 19, Rowan Marshall went on an unprecedented hot-streak for Pakenham. He polled 16 of a possible 18 votes, having 4 BOG performances. Those ridiculous numbers catapulted him up the leaderboard and he finished the year with 5 BOG games. In the Round 17 Hughenden and Coolgardie clash, the double-barrelled name combination of Byrne-Jones and McDonald-Tipunwuti combined to poll 5 votes in the one game. This is the most votes in one game by players with double-barrelled names. There were 15 tied scores that effected the scores throughout the year. There was even a 3-way tie for 1 vote and a score of 122. The Snakes - 4 different colours of snake (Yellow, Orange, Pink, Purple), 4 different positions (D, M, R, F) The midfield is clearly the dominant position, but the rucks hold their own. I'd classify these as the pink and purple snakes. The forward line is next most important, so is the orange snake. The defense is the worst for polling BAFFU votes, so deserves to be the worst colour: the yellow snake IC is just misfits, like when you randomly get a multi-coloured snake Fruits - thrown in to every Party Mix bag, there's usually about 18 of these lollies. Same as the number of teams in the ORFFU Coolgardie and Blanchetown lacked the top end talent, as did Pearcedale. Pearcedale had a surprisingly good year given this stat but this lack of a real star possibly caused the 9th place finish for a second year running Groote were the kings of the votes and possibly deserved to make finals, but got unlucky. Patrick Cripps' highest score wasn't even during the home and away rounds... Nutsy again dominated the votes polled stat, winning it for the second year running Dinosaurs: The Leaderboard - there were lots of players and lots of dinosaurs, but we only care about an important top 10 or so The race was fairly tight for the start of the year, but in the end one man ran away with it. Hopefully the (slightly) entertaining reports have kept you interested this year. If you have any more stats or feedback for me to include, give me a shout. I've got a big excel sheet with a lot of untapped potential Two players remained from the top 4 last year (was Gawn, Grundy, Macrae, Mitchell) - Gawn and Grundy. Fyfe joined them, but was still not close to winning. Congratulations to a dominant figure in the ORFFU this year: Brodie Grundy. @bryzza and Nutsy need him to keep it up for 2 more weeks!
Team by team Ararat Armadillos @insider Banchang Barcrawlers @choppers Blanchetown Bunyips @martyg Christmas Island Smugglers @DamoH Cow Bay Crocs @fresh Coolgardie Prospectors @JPK Eden Whalers @HOLKY Groote Eylandt Barracudes @YAD69 Gisborne Grenades
Hughenden Prairie Dogs @Batfink King Island Monarchs @Tylo Korumburra Blowflies @Mick Nuytsland Vikings @bryzza Pakenham Parasites @ddsaints Pearcedale Panthers @TigersTooTough Southern Cross Sandgropers @eagle_eyed Serengeti Buffaloes @wrightbrendan Staghorn Flat Bulls @tyze1 Unfortunately, your cruel commish @JPK has not forked out on a cash prize for the coach of the winning player. Your faithful BAFFU team will endeavour to push for better remuneration for next season.
You see @Tomster I really enjoyed that report, and I was going to give you a huge thumbs up, but then you stabbed me in the back
I agree...but I reckon it's the green snakes that are the worst ones not the yellow ones Great work @Tomster , love the stats and write up.