AFL draws

Australian Rules Football (AFL) is a football code in which there are "goals" and "behinds". A goal scores 6 points and a behind scores 1 point. An example score is "13 10 88", which means 13 goals, 10 behinds = 88 points. Because a large range of total scores in a game are possible, draws are quite rare.

The current AFL national competition involving 16 teams had its origins in 1897 in the state of Victoria, in the Victoria Football League (VFL). The records of the VFL and AFL are often considered together, representing the elite Australian rules football competitions over that time period.

There have been 109 seasons between 1897 and 2005 (inclusive). The distribution of the number of draws per season is as follows:

The rarity of draws suggests that a Poisson distribution could be fitted to these data. The average number of draws is 1.229. Using a Poisson distribution with this mean gives predicted frequencies shown in the graph, with the observed frequencies.

The predicted frequencies are similar to the observed frequencies. The data fit a Poisson model quite well.

The full data set is below. The year 1977 was particularly unusual: the Grand Final was a draw, and hence was replayed the following week, and in round 7 of that year there were two draws. In one of them the points scored by both teams were 98, and in the other, 99.