I've enjoyed the weekly updates in this thread.
The so-called "curse of the bye" is something of a bugbear for me, so I took a closer look at the numbers. If you like lots of charts, here it is.
Brief summary: once scheduling and the predicted result are taken into account, only a small number of post-bye game results each season are unexpected.
The issue I have with these annual articles in the AFL media concerning the effect of the bye is that they are usually very simplistic, just win-loss counts with no further consideration of why teams might be losing after a bye.
One particularly bad example doesn't even take into account whether one or both teams came off the bye! Clearly, if coming off a bye is theoretically a disadvantage, that would be cancelled out when both teams come off it.
I think the most important factor missing from these articles is: was the team that lost expected to lose?
By a quirk of scheduling, it turns out that of the 144 post-mid-season bye games 2012-2023 with one team coming off a bye, that team was the away team in 88 games (61%). And we know that away teams are more likely to lose.
We can go further by looking at the betting odds for those games to see who was the favourite. And we see that whilst there is some variation, favourites generally win and non-favourites generally lose.
By team? Gold Coast's post-mid-season bye record is 1-9 (win-loss). But guess what - they were favourites in the game that they won and non-favourites in the nine that they lost. In other words they lose a lot of games in general, leading to low expectations.
That's an extreme case and at the other extreme is Geelong, who do seem to have a genuine post-bye issue in that they have lost a large proportion of post-bye games that they were expected to win.
When we take who was expected to win into account, there are typically 2-3 unexpected results in games with one team coming off the bye each season.
For the 14 such games in 2023 there was one unexpected win (GWS vs Melbourne) and two unexpected losses (Brisbane vs Hawthorn and Fremantle vs Richmond).
Here's the full set of 14 post-bye games (one team off the bye) for 2023.
Season |
Round |
Team |
HA.Name |
Opponent |
Margin |
Result |
Odds |
Favourite |
2023 |
R13 |
Brisbane Lions |
Away.Team |
Hawthorn |
-25 |
L |
1.25 |
Y |
2023 |
R13 |
Fremantle |
Home.Team |
Richmond |
-15 |
L |
1.63 |
Y |
2023 |
R14 |
Geelong |
Away.Team |
Port Adelaide |
-38 |
L |
2.34 |
N |
2023 |
R14 |
Gold Coast |
Away.Team |
Carlton |
-59 |
L |
2.21 |
N |
2023 |
R15 |
Melbourne |
Away.Team |
Geelong |
-15 |
L |
1.99 |
N |
2023 |
R15 |
West Coast |
Away.Team |
Sydney |
-171 |
L |
12.23 |
N |
2023 |
R15 |
Essendon |
Away.Team |
Fremantle |
-32 |
L |
2.16 |
N |
2023 |
R15 |
Hawthorn |
Away.Team |
Gold Coast |
-67 |
L |
3.61 |
N |
2023 |
R16 |
Richmond |
Away.Team |
Brisbane Lions |
-81 |
L |
3.21 |
N |
2023 |
R16 |
North Melbourne |
Away.Team |
Adelaide |
-66 |
L |
8.22 |
N |
2023 |
R16 |
Western Bulldogs |
Home.Team |
Fremantle |
29 |
W |
1.52 |
Y |
2023 |
R16 |
Port Adelaide |
Away.Team |
Essendon |
4 |
W |
1.44 |
Y |
2023 |
R16 |
Carlton |
Away.Team |
Hawthorn |
60 |
W |
1.34 |
Y |
2023 |
R16 |
GWS |
Away.Team |
Melbourne |
2 |
W |
2.88 |
N |
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