Will post footage if they upload it but Tim Watson spoke on Talking Footy about Woosha’s comments on our returning boys “hitting a wall.” He said that they’re just finding it tough because the game is quicker since 2015 and has moved on a bit. He said it’s not permanent and that we will do the opposite of hitting a wall later in the year as we will build endurance and get used to it. I link this with Woosha’s comments about us being better in the second half of the year.
I once would have thought that this was obvious to everyone, … then we lost to the Crows and so many blitzers proved it wasn’t.
Nothing you can do about some levels of ignorance it seems, … even if as a Coach you foresaw it AND fking told everyone so.
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Today’s stupid number crunching: optmism, pessimism, and realism.
Going back over our last ten years of games (round 1 2007 - round 4 2017), I’ve looked at our wins and losses from the point of view of a pessimist, an optimist, and a “realist”. The optimist always assumes a win, the pessimist always assumes a loss, and the “realist” is roughly based on both teams’ form.
The “realist” rules are:
- if we had more wins than our opponent at the time of the game, predicts a win
- if we had fewer wins, predict a loss
- if both teams have the same number of wins, and one team won the previous round, predict the team that won (go with form)
- if both teams had the same result the previous round, predict the team that won the last time they played each other
This is a naive ruleset obviously, but anyhing else could be easily accused of being optimistic or pessimistic.
So, from the dataset of 227 games we get the following (the numbers in brackets are if you discount 2016 as an aberration year):
- The optimist was right 41% (44%) of the time
- The pessimist was right 57% (54%) of the time*
- The “realist” was right 63% (62%) of the time
- There were 35 (32) unexpected wins and 46 (44) unexpected losses (for the “realist”, obviously there are no unexpected wins for the optimist, and no unexpected losses for the pessimist)
*the 2% discrepancy is from the draws
The above obviously only covers week to week predictions. If you want to talk about seasonal predictions, where the optimist assumes we’ll improve over last season, and the pessimist assumes we’ll stagnate or get worse it’s 4 times up the ladder, 6 times down the ladder (4 and 5 if you ignore 2016) .
Conclusions:
- the pessimists are technically being more realistic than the optimists
- that doesn’t mean that the pessimists aren’t also being miserable ■■■■■■
- number crunching doesn’t really say much about anything
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What was our percent of wins over that period?
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Extra analysis, easy enough now you’ve set it up? Get the stats for first and second halves of each season, to see if the oft-quoted fall-off glooming is correct?
Before the Carlton game, I went through our draw.
Based on 13 wins winning a Finals berth, I thought that we could easily attain 6 wins after the Bye.
Which means we had to turn at 7 - 5 at the break.
I was a lot more confident of achieving that at 3 and 0, now it looks tough.
Having said that, I think we can easily win our next 2, and with confidence restored, that Freo Away game Rd.7 is close to 50/50.
I guess I tend to follow the general vibe.
We will struggle for consistency, and 10 wins would seem about our level this year, but it’s so early.
The next 3 Rounds will tell us which direction we should go for the remainder of the year.
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Because the optimist always predicts a win, our overall win percentage is the same value.
Splitting the season in to first and second half, our win rates are 46% in the first half and 38% in the second half.
Split the season into thirds (1-8, 9-15, 16-23) and it’s 50%, 42%, 33%.
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Feel like we need a name for the current Essendon era. The “Post-Sheedy Era” doesn’t cut it because we were crap in his last few years. I used “Post Finals Essendon” the other day but that may not be accurate either.
I’d say we just entered the “Post Coitus” era myself, …
That’s what it’s called when you’re just catching your breath after receiving a good hard reaming isn’t it?
It is shaping up as development season. From round 10 onwards the older guys will start to fall away and get “injured” or “rested” or even play a game or 2 in the VFL (unlikely). The second half of the season could be a lot of fun from a spectators viewpoint. Whoosh will respect the likes of Watson, Baguley, Hocking, Stanton etc but he is a hard ■■■■■■■ and will be seeing 2018 and 2019 as the real deal for the emerging group.
Prediction of 8 wins and a decent draft position.
Post Elephant Era?
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We beat the Pies and we will have a “not far off finals with this team”
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It’s the lid on era
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It’s been lid on for 15 years
You’re telling the story mate.
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There’s clearly about 7 different “eras” in that time, we just happened to have mostly been rubbish in all of them.
*the obvious exceptions being the “on all the best placebos era” and the “we hate the AFL and everything it stands for and we will stick it up them, until we realise that they own us” era. We were awesome in both of those.
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The placebo era was when we played our best football. Good attacking mindset but also defensive enough to know that we could hold teams, didn’t need to beat them in a shootout
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I call it the post-national draft era.
Our success previously had come from great players coming up through zones, family connections and local leagues. The last of those included the Baby Bombers (plus Bomba and Tim Watson) who won the '93 flag, some of whom went on to be key in the 2000 season (e.g Hird, Fletcher, Misiti, Mercuri, Alessio, GO’D (?), Bewick [the last player signed on a form four]).
The decade after that was ruined by not being able to replace those players due to the wasted terrible choices at the top of the draft since its inception (including this-century luminaries like Davies, Harvey, Laycock, Bradley, etc).
Though drafting has got better in the post-Sheedy era, we then lost the last 5 seasons courtesy of Vlad and Gill and their mates.
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This.
I just looked at the fixture, and being in a pessimistic mood, can realistically see us losing every game going into the bye.
Nope.
Nope.
Nope.