Another week of slipping down the leaderboard for our model, getting 4 out of 7 correct last weekend when many on Superbru got the Hurricanes/Highlanders result right too. As usual when things don’t go our way we’ll try distract you with a graphic. It seemed to us that winning margins have been getting bigger in recent weeks, so here’s a plot of the average winning margin per round over the competition. Blue lines indicate lines of best fit for the first 8 round and next 9 rounds. We’ve cherry picked our split at round 8 for maximum effect, but it looks like there could be something there: let’s see what happens this weekend.

Here are the outcomes for last weekend followed by predictions for the weekend ahead:

It was a pretty mediocre 4 out of 7 correct for our model last weekend. Home teams dominated again, with 6 out of 7 home teams winning. That includes a couple of upsets: Crusaders over Hurricances, Lions over Waratahs, and the sheer size of the Highlanders win over the Chiefs. Here are the outcomes for last weekend followed by predictions for the weekend ahead. Last weekend’s big wins make this week’s predictions interesting. The Reds-Chiefs game looks much closer than it did a week ago!

Last week saw our model get five out of weekend’s seven games correct, roughly the same as the Superbru average. It also saw only 3 home teams winning, compared to 4 away teams, remembering we’re keeping an eye on that statistic. This week we thought we’d look at some more data visualization using networks. The figures below show the rounds in which each team in the competition won. A line between a team and a number indicates that the team won in that round, and we’ve divided teams up by their country to make it easier to see what’s going on. No Australian team won in round 9, and no South African team won in round 14, for example. Most teams pick up a few wins here and there, but these tend to be scattered throughout the competition rather than concentrated in a run of “form”. An exception is the Sharks: they put together a run in rounds 5, 6 and 7 but have fallen away badly since then.

Here are the outcomes for last weekend followed by predictions for the weekend ahead. Only the Stormers and Sharks are unanimously tipped to win, otherwise looks like a weekend of close games!