06-14-2024, 08:37 AM
(06-14-2024, 08:01 AM)kruddler link Wrote:Not suggesting otherwise lods. But that is the point. Looking at the data over a large period of time will show you these changes. As it will not just be club to club that is varying but league averages as a whole. Year to year, decade to decade.
The thing is though it will all be relative. In the 70s all the teams were scoring more than any of the teams now. But there will be an average (afl/vfl wide) over that period and looking at the teams above that vs the teams below that will tell you a story of relative strengths to each other.
You can also analyse that to see how much better a team is vs the average at the time and that would be comparable to today.
In simplistic terms, looking at how many wins a team has will vary year to year with teams output but also amount of games in a season.
So instead look at % of game they have won.
A 18-2 team is the same as a 9-1 team, 90% win record. That eliminates the season length variable.
There are other tricks to use as well.
All data will fit on a bell curve with 99%(?) Of data fitting within 3 STD deviations of the mean. The further away from that the rarer it is....the outliers.
You compare year to year based off of that.
You could do it over a decade or 3 weeks or whatever time period you want.
But you 100% can compare and in an unbiased way.
I don't want to get bogged down in a maths lecture, suffice to say, low numbers does not make it negligible.
We should probably agree to disagree Kruds.
Neither of us are going to change our opinion
I really don't discount statistics completely.
I often use them myself...but I give them less value than I do observation, even observation that contains a bit of the occasional bias.
I guess the way I see it is you're trying to apply the "logic of mathematics" to the most illogical and unpredictable of games.
A game where things that shouldn't happen often do.
A game where things such as 'momentum' in a match can change in minutes just by a side lifting their effort.