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Written by FootyGeek
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Jun 28, 2005 at 02:26 PM |
A lot of words are typed and discussions made at pubs and games around Australia about how 'even' the AFL competition is each season. Every year we seem to hear about how the ladder has never been even. The question remains however, is the competition really getting more even.
To find out how even the competition is I analysed the ladder percentages each year to see how much each teams percentage deviated from each other year to year and decade to decade.
In a lot of uneven competitions (such as many country leagues) you will see end of season ladders where one team may have a percentage of 250% plus and the bottom team may be very low (less than 50%).
So what I did was take the standard deviation of the percentages on the ladder at the end of each season.
A higher standard deviation means the competition is more uneven, a lower standard deviation means the competition is more even.
As you can see from the graph below, despite some ups and downs the trend over many decades has been for the competition to become more and more even. In fact the introduction by the AFL of many policies designed to make the competition more even do not appear to have sped up a process that has already been happening over 100 years.
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Last Updated ( Jun 28, 2005 at 02:29 PM )
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