@fresh Absolutely amazing work mate. You don’t get this level of analysis at professional level. You’re a god!
Great work @fresh That's a champion effort. Really appreciate all the work you've put into all of this over the years.
Ha, if they were "professional" then they would have this sort of analysis. That other league that calls themselves AFL can only one day hope to be half as good as FU
Analysis of FU related stuff The final part of the FU stats series covers some interesting stuff I came across (well, to me anyway) while putting this all together and it didn’t quite fit into the other sections. Ladder Position, Wins and Average Points For I’ve talked about ladder positions, wins and points for previously but it’s been a while since I put all those things into the same chart and put some words under them so I’m going to do it again. We know that ladder position is based on wins, then points for. I plotted the end of H&A season ladder position of all teams over the last 10 years against the number of wins in a scatter chart. That light purple dot in the top right corner, that’s the 2021 Groote team and 2018 Ararat team that finished 1st with a 16-win effort. The dark greenish dot in the bottom left, that’s Blanchetown’s 2018 winless season. I inserted that horizontal line at a ladder position of 8th. Following the horizontal dashed line across from left to right you can clearly see that the first dot on this line falls at 9 wins. Then if you look at all the dots in the 9 wins column, some teams finished as high as 7th with 9 wins (last happened in 2017, Korumburra) and as low as 11th (again in 2017, Carnamah). If you want your team to start to have a chance to play finals, you need at least 9 wins, but only 7 out of 24 teams that finished on 9 wins have made it into the top 8. Last year’s Staghorn Flat team is one of those 7. At 10 wins (where the vertical dashed line is) a team has finished as high as 4th (2017 Groote) and as low as 9th (2019 Carnamah). A team has finished the H&A season on 10 wins 16 times, and 14 of those teams finished at least 8th. At 11 wins, no team has finished lower than 7th (most recent occurrence was Groote in 2023) and as high as 3rd (Blanchetown in 2015 was the last time this happened). A 10-7 record doesn’t quite guarantee a top 8 finish but an 11-6 record does. If our aim is finals at 10 wins, then the next chart shows the average score each team that has achieved for a certain number of wins over the decade. The yellow dashed vertical line is drawn at 10 wins and has a number of dots ranging from 1174 to 1318. What this is indicating is that your team needs to score at least 1174 on average across the 17 rounds to have a shot at the top 8. Let’s take the average score in our league, 1200 which is the orange horizontal line. If you follow this line left starting from the 10 wins line, you can see an orange dot at 6 wins (Exmouth in 2014). If you work your way back to the right you’ll see a light green dot at 12 wins (Pakenham in 2020). Now this is saying, if you score the average 1200 points every week, at the end of 17 rounds you can end up with anywhere between 6 wins to 12 wins. Well wtf should you aim for then if there’s all this contradictory stuff? My suggestion is to aim for an average of 1250 every week (the pink horizontal line). At this score, you’re pretty much guaranteed 8 wins each week. 8 wins will ensure you end up anywhere from 14th to 9th. But with the randomness of performance and player scores, you may end up with 14 wins (the lowest dot in the column of dots at 14 wins) and a guaranteed top 4 spot. That light green dot represents Nuytsland in 2020 when they had an average score of 1262 each week. A score of 1200 each week translates to an average of 80 points per player. An average score of 1250 is 83 points per player. There’s really not much in it and goes to show how fickle minor differences in player averages can make to the number of wins you could expect in a season. Finalist Rankings I’ve left out 2014 data from this next section. The breakdown of the total score in TS isn’t accurate and I don’t think even the scoring was either. I was interested in seeing the positional rankings of every finalist over the last 9 years. Is there anything consistent that we can learn from those years that we can aim to improve in our own teams to make the top 8? We tend to see a lot of blue shading in the tables above (indicating a team was ranked in the top 8). Not surprising at all. There have been 8 occasions that a team that wasn’t in the top 8 for points for made finals. 5 of those times a team was ranked 9th. Those other 3 times a team was ranked 11th (twice) and 14th. Summing it up, out of the 72 times a team made the top 8: 64 (89%) were in the top 8 for points scored over the H&A season 51 (71%) were in the top 8 for scores from forwards and the interchange 50 (69%) were in the top 8 for midfielder scores 43 (60%) were in the top 8 for scores from defenders 38 (53%) were in the top 8 for ruck scores. If you’re building out your team, it seems that it’s more important to focus on building out your forward and midfield lines. Depth (interchange) is also very important. This makes sense since players tend to either get injured or are managed during the second half of the season. Defence is important, but not as much. Nuytsland won the premiership in 2020 with the worst defensive scores in our league. Serengeti won in 2017 with the 16th best defensive line. But both teams had either a very good midfield, forward or interchange line. I thought the ruck line was very surprising. Just over half of finalists had a top 8 ruck line. Even if you look at our premiers, those from 2015-2017 has a ruck line ranked 9th best, and Bueng Kan’s premiership year in 2021 saw them with the 6th best ruck scores. Nuytsland and Ararat have won the premiership was a top 4 ruck line in their years. In any case. Have a great ruck like Gawn, Grundy or English is a decent help to your scoring effort. But as long as your ruck is at least average, it seems like you’ve got a decent enough shot at a FU premiership.
Closing remarks I’ve had a blast being part of this league. I hope that you’ve gotten some enjoyment from reading the thesis that I’ve put together in this thread. If you have any requests or ideas for analysis or things you’d like to see, feel free to let me know and I’ll see what I can do to put it together. Good luck next season and next decade.
Unreal! @fresh This plethora of analysis is going to take a while to digest! Love your work mate! Thank you