After a dominating win over Great Britain, followed by a tough and exciting win over Australia, some extremely exuberant pundits decided that Tonga were the best nation in the world and worthy of Tier 1 status. Putting aside the fact that a poor island nation of 100,000 is not capable of generating enough native talent… Read More Tonga are still a long shot for the 2021 World Cup
Over the last month, we’ve been looking at rating players using a metric called Production Per Game, or PPG. We’ve used it to find players at the higher end, justifying million dollar salaries, and at the lower end, identifying fringe first graders. The tricky thing about rating players is determining what information from the past… Read More The Art of Projection
If you’re the Eels, probably a lot more than zero. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Around the start of the finals last year, The Arc posted the probabilities of each finalist winning the AFL grand final. Some guy on Twitter (let’s call him Bill because I don’t remember who it was and I’m not… Read More How many NRL premierships should your team have won?
The Collated Ladder takes in two inputs: The projected number of wins for each club from the Stocky The projected number of wins for each club from Pythagorean expectations Put simply, the Collated Ladder is an average of these two numbers, with a 2:1 weighting towards the output of the Stocky, rounded to the nearest… Read More Primer – How does the Collated Ladder work?
The Stocky, which is short for stochastic simulation, is a Monte Carlo simulation of the season using Elo modelling to work out what the outcome of that season might be. The basic premise of a Monte Carlo simulation is that if you have a few pieces of the puzzle, an idea of how they relate… Read More Primer – How does the Stocky work?
In my previous primer on Elo ratings, I talked about different ways of calculating Elo ratings with a view of measuring form and/or class. This primer will look in a bit more depth at how I arrived at the specific numbers for the variables. The main variables in an Elo model are: Starting ratings (discrete… Read More Primer – What variables do the Elo models use?
Pythago NRL 