Torture the statistics and they’ll confess to anything

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Subscribe to Hawks Insiders for the most in-depth and wide ranging Hawthorn coverage available. Exclusive interviews to analysis, match recaps to podcasts, the Insiders have you covered.

Having graduated with an Economics Degree (along with playing cricket for many, many years), it was drilled into me many moons ago that you can torture the statistics, and they’ll confess to anything - i.e. provide a position to support your own perspective.

Mick in action.

With this background, it has always been a point of interest as to how statistics and sports analytics have been applied to Australian Rules football in recent years.

While cricket has had stats as part of its history forever and a day, I think it was the impact of “Moneyball” that, aside from the identification of players suiting your recruitment needs, also opened the growth in of applying sports analytics for the AFL clubs.

Disposal Efficiency

Specifically, my interest in modern AFL statistical analysis is piqued by the concept of ‘disposal efficiency’. In a game where disposal can take two forms - by foot or hand, it makes it different to most other sports in the world where ball movement is by one method e.g. soccer (feet) or by specialist roles e.g. American football (quarterbacks / receivers, running backs or punters).

This is why I believe that we need to be more specific when analysing disposal efficiency.

To my mind, and as a starting point, when you look at the concept of disposal efficiency, if a player goes by hand, then they should be going at 90%+ - particularly when reading the Champion Data definition:

“Effective Handball: A handball to a teammate that hits the intended target.”

For an elite player to miss a handball target would mean that their decision making was likely to be poor if they miss the target rather than a skill error. I would be prepared to accept that sometimes an opponent may be able to knock down or intercept an occasional handball, particularly for those working inside the contest. This expectation is even more pertinent when you consider how much time they spend on handball drills at training.