Great post, Max! 
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I think a contributing factor to our treatment by umpires is that we are a too fair as as team in terms of a whole.
Most of our players give the ball back if they are paid a free against them.
We rarely scrag opposition, don’t hold jumpers, don’t lock arms in marking contests, don’t initiate wrestling, don’t pick of opposition with late shephards etc. I could go on but you get the picture.
So when Hurley does this or smith or Long. It stands out and we get hammered by the umpires.
We need to do this all over the field at every contest. Make it our brand.
And then and only then stop. If umpires start consistently calling us out for it.
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I take it the 88 games are interstate and we had 205 away games overall. So that means:
- 22 from 88 interstate - 25% rate
- 41 from 117 away in Melb - 35% rate
- 111 from 206 home games - 54% rate
No wonder we struggle to win interstate games…
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Lol.
There were a few of those on Sunday. Astounding how when there are only 2 players, in plain sight, not 1 umpire happens to see it. 
Can someone please put together a video of all the blatant free kicks missed this year and put it on youtube…that would be awesome.
That is unfair.
Bix presented the data.
No assumptions made - he just showed the facts.
Interpreting the facts may depend on some assumptions.
If you are saying that an assumption is that OVER TWO DECADES, frees should not be approximately equal, then your null hypothesis is that the maggots have a long-term bias.
Analysis of the data should be to reject the alternative null hypothesis, i.e. that the maggots do not have any bias.
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Stringer gave away a free for a clumsy high spoil attempt in the last quarter I think, around the centre of the ground. Some 20 seconds later a Collingwood forward did precisely the same thing to our defender and it was waived on.
I reckon you could find about half dozen glaringly obvious frees that were not paid to us without too much trouble.
But, you know, they missed a clear mark to de goey so it was poor both ways.
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Not unfair at all. The data was “free kick differential”. Using that as a measure suggests that the reasonable outcome for any game of football is for free kicks paid to be equal. Which it isn’t. You can’t seriously expect that each team commits an equal number of rule violations in ANY sport at all?
Simmo41 is making a point that I think is relevant to the conversation though. I am obviously in the boat that think we are hard done by, and believe that in some shape or form that there is a bias against us, and bias towards keeping games close.
But depending on how a team plays it can mean that they give away a lot of free kicks, so we can’t assume that over a long period of time, or short for that matter, that free kick counts should be even across the board. Its a bit more complex then that.
I started to do that a couple of years ago but was howled down by the Vichy BBers.
Here is one example comparing what the maggots think we can’t do but our opponents can:
Very pleased that John has come out and said something. Obviously what he has said has been carefully constructed by media advisers, which is really the only way it could be done. Glad he also stated that its not only the ones we are getting payed against us but also the ones that we are not getting.
Don’t know if it will help or do anything, but at least we have said something.
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You can over 400+ games per club and hundreds of combinations of players, umpires, venues, coaches and conditions yes. I posted 10 game averages to capture longer time period trends. What you are saying doesn’t make sense.
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No. It’s looking at a sample drawn from a long period of time. It’s not an N=1 equation.
Challenge accepted.
+1 with @TrevorBix here.
People are confounding data with analysis, and also seem unaware of how statistical analyses should be performed.
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I’ll tidy it up a bit then.
Why should free kick counts be evenly balanced across 1/100/1,000,000 games of football?
Unless there is an inherent bias, there should be regression to the mean over time
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Yeah, you get it. There is not a single team-based sport in the world where you would expect the same number of infringements to be awarded to both teams in a match.
Well one obvious reason is that the maggots themselves try (or at least used to try) to balance things out - that’s why we get those evener-uppers in Q4 on the backline.
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