Analysing football finals with a spreadsheet

Using sporting applications to make mathematics more interesting to both secondary and tertiary students is often discussed in the literature, eg Clarke (1984, 1991), de Mestre (1987). Australian Rules Football, being the winter sport followed by most people in the southern states of Australia, certainly qualifies as being of interest to students, and several authors (Clarke (1984,1988), Weal (1987), Schwertman & Howard (1989), Watson (1991)), have suggested ways to incorporate football into the classroom. In this article, we show that a mathematical analysis capable of being performed by secondary students can shed light on the appropriateness of the current AFL finals system - a topic causing much discussion on radio and TV and in the daily press. To generate the 128 equally likely results the aid of a spreadsheet (or a word processor) is enlisted.