The AFL has listened to gamblers but continues to ignore fantasy coaches who had their teams ruined. (more…)

Blink and you’ll miss it! I was kindly flown up to Sydney late last year by Google to do this interview to talk about their AdSense program and get a sneaky plug in for FanFooty, although the resultant story concentrates rather more on the bloke in the yacht than your humble correspondent… but if you were the editor, wouldn’t you? (more…)

Tucked away among today’s announcements of a raft of changes to the AFL Laws of the Game was a little trial of a new type of position for Australian football: the substitute. While others can debate over rushed behinds and extra boundary umpires, fantasy coaches’ ears should be pricking up at this news that could have a significant impact on fantasy football in years to come. (more…)

Kudos to the Age for daring to report on the speech given by Justin Shaffer, senior vice-president new media for Major League Baseball, last week which referenced the AFL’s exclusive $60 million online content deal with Telstra. This is a topic which needs more background to understand exactly why the AFL has shortchanged online fans for so long. (more…)

The FanFooty forum is now up and running, with boards for Dream Team and Super Coach (including team, player and league sub-boards), Lethal League, Fox Sports, Premium Dream Team and FanFooty private leagues. Please be gentle on the software, each other and particularly me! (more…)

After asking for comments on the concept of AFL depth charts in my last post, I decided to go ahead and construct charts for each AFL team. With the help of posters at BigFooty in a thread on the subject, I think the charts are fairly accurate now for most teams. (more…)

Those of you fantasy nuts out there who are interested in American sports are well into the fantasy giridron season, with the NFL into week 6, with baseball just finishing up and basketball about to start again. One of the features that is a staple of fantasy analysis in the States is the team depth chart, and I’m wondering if something like that would be useful for Australian fantasy coaches. (more…)

I’ve already launched this on the latest edition of the Coaches Box podcast yesterday, but I should let readers of the FanFooty blog know about it as well.

Each AFL player is classified by Champion Data (official stat providers to the AFL) in the 2008 AFL Prospectus according to their position, their size and their role. For instance, Brett Burton is a medium-sized general forward, which means his classification is Fwd-Med-Gen. Similarly, Sam Mitchell is a small inside midfielder, giving him the designation of Mid-Small-In, and Sam Fisher is a tall key-position defender, meaning he has the code of Def-Tall-Key.

The Breakdown - there is a Dream Team Breakdown and a Super Coach Breakdown - is a table that lists the averages of each Champion Data player type against each AFL team in 2008, along with how many players have played against that team of that designation, with links to drill down on each score from each player against each opponent. The cells in the table are colour-coded according to their ranking: the lowest team average is coloured red, the second- to fourth-lowest are light red, the second- to fourth-highest are light green and the highest is solid green.

Those who are long-time listeners of the Coaches Box know that this kind of table made its public debut on the Round 22 episode last year, when we had Statsman74 on the show. Among the numerous spreadsheet screenshots he shared with us were two labeled DT scores by player positions and types - Part 1 and DT scores by player positions and types - Part 2, which are pretty much what you see in the Breakdown. Unlike those spreadsheets, however, the Breakdown includes links to the full list of players of each position who have already played against that opponent in 2008, as well as a list of this week’s relevant players.

The Breakdown is a powerful tool for helping to pick captains and figuring out which players are worth selling due to their rollercoaster coming to an end… or not. For instance, Dean Cox traditionally has a day out against the Swans, but even he struggled in the reverse fixture earlier in the year, and no ruckman has scored over 86 against Sydney all year so it might be time to take the captain’s armband off him this week. As we said in the podcast, it’s also an indicator that this week is not the time to sell Cyril Rioli because small forwards tend to carve up the Dons. It should also prove useful for those participating in the Lethal League or Premium DT competitions who are looking to pick up new players for a week or two of service: Michael Gardiner against the Bulldogs has a great matchup, as do small Kangaroo defenders like Gavin Urquhart and Ed Lower.

Enjoy!

Sorry I haven’t been blogging in the last little bit. There have been some shenanigans behind the scenes here, but they’re over now. I’ll try to at least keep up with the Bubble and Rollercoaster posts each week, plus whatever else takes my fancy.

And don’t forget the live weekly Coaches Box podcast on Talkshoe, where you can chat with other listeners and we take your suggestions for which players to talk about in real time. Another episode will happen tonight at 10.30pm AEST.

I guess it was only a matter of time. Oh well, it was good while it lasted!