The following is an Administrative Decision following the Post 2022 Logistix Stats Review.
(the RGC were also consulted)
Decision: The HO multiplier in the Ute calc will increase from 0.35 to 0.40.
Rationale Summary
This is an obvious and necessary adjustment to incrementally bring the ruckman back into the game, required due to an unexpected collapse in AFL Hit Outs (HO’s). It’s a small, judicious change year on year rather than overreacting all of a sudden.
Full Rationale:
A couple years ago the league voted for a double change to the ute score – to effectively reduce the value of handballs at the same time as reducing the HO multiplier from 0.5 to 0.3.
This change really improved the Utes by creating true allrounders as top Utes, many of whom are not otherwise rewarded in other categories.
However unfortunately this killed ruckmen in the HFFL.
So last year we took a small step to reverse the damage by increasing the HO multiplier from 0.3 to 0.35. Unfortunately this has not done enough. The reason is there has been an unexpected collapse in the total HOs of the top ruckman since the COVID year.
See this screenshot showing an almost 30% drop in total hitouts of the top 6 ruckman from 2018 to 2022! [COVID year excluded]
This was obviously unexpected!
So we simply need to adjust the HO multiplier again up to 0.4 to account for the collapsing HOs.
A summary of the situation is shown in the below screenshot that shows the number of ruck Utes that are Elite, 11-20 or 21-30 depending on the HO multiplier.
You can see by increasing the HO’s back to 0.4 using both 2021 and 2022 stats, we bring 2 more ruckman into the top 30. Additionally, we increase the ranking of the top 2 ruck Utes without making them dominant.
I’ve provided a spreadsheet below showing the above 2 sheets and also the HFFL 2022 and 2021 stats demonstrating the different options for the HO multiplier of 0.35 and 0.4. I’ve highlighted the ruckman stats in yellow and they are also obvious as I have left the HO column visible as well.
HFFL 2022 Logistix Stats Review – HO Multiplier
Kind Regards,
Logistix