You've landed on the archived version of the MAFL Website, which contains all of the content up to the end of the 2013 season. Please visit the new site at mafl-online.squarespace.com or, better yet, at matterofstats.com to access everything that's here plus all the new content. Hope to see you there soon.

Some information about the move is contained in this blog.

Welcome to the MAFL Website

The MAFL Website is a site mostly concerned with predicting and analysing the results of games of Australian Rules Football (usually referred to as AFL games), adopting an approach similar to that which Bill James pioneered in baseball through what's now known as 'sabermetrics'.

You can read about the history of MAFL in the MAFL History and Archives section where you can also download copies of the newsletters from 2005 to 2008, which pre-date the move of MAFL to the digital form. There's also a fairly comprehensive FAQ on the site, called the MAFL Primer, which provides background and links to the huge number of blog entries on the site. 

Or, if you prefer, you can avail yourself of the site search facility that indexes all of the MAFL content except that within the newsletters.

All of the AFL-related content lives in one of four blog journals: 

• the Wagers & Tips blog, which carries all the week-to-week information about the teams I'm tipping and backing to win. This blog is mostly active during the AFL season proper, which runs from late March to late September, though I will made the occasional posting to this blog outside that window. If you're new to the site, the post entitled 2012: Understanding the Tipsters, Margin Predictors and Fund Algorithms might be helpful as it provides a comprehensive overview of the information that you'll find each week in this blog. (There's a 2013 update here, which covers more-recent amendments.)
• the Team Dashboards blog, which will provide access to the most recent version of the one-page team dashboards I produce
• the Statistical Analyses blog, which has a much more technical and statistical flavour and looks at the entire history of the competition as well as interesting aspects of the current season
• the Simulations blog, which is generally most active late in the season when I'll project the likely composition of the finals. Occasionally I'll simulate some other stuff too such as how bookmakers of different skill levels fare against punters with different skills and wagering behaviours 

You can navigate to any of these pages via the links just provided or by clicking on the links at the top of this page. 

If you want to be notified by e-mail whenever there's fresh blog content you can subscribe to MAFL Online by clicking on the Subscribe by Email link on the right of the screen. 

The site also contains a more general statistical blog, Probability and Statistics, which hosts the occasional post on some topic in probability and statistics that's piqued my interest and that's (usually) not football-related.

'Not sure why they don't trust me with money ...'

The MAFL Mascot

For those of you who've read this far wondering about the face at the top of this page, I can reveal that it belongs to Chi, our Pom-Chi, the Official MAFL Mascot, a more refined photo of whom appears at right - and no, we didn't put the sticker there.

Chi's role in MAFL is now more decorative than fiscal. For a time we allowed him to make wagers on games on the basis of his predictions, but the decision to entrust money to a dog whose intellect was perhaps best demonstrated by the 3 days it took him to realise the dog door we'd installed on our back door worked in both directions and not just for exiting the house, turned out to be a poor one. We know him far better now. 

More photos of him, and of the Assistant Mascot, Quila, can be found in the Photos and Links section.

Thanks for visiting. I hope you'll come back often; Chi will be waiting.