This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.
Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com
Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.
Before the Bounce
We’re not quite a third of the way through the season, winter is starting to make itself felt, and footy is starting to become a routine grind after the flashy baubles of the early season fixture.
Conventional wisdom would say that this is a good time to take stock of the ladder and how it’s starting to take shape.
Plenty of pundits like to whip out hot takes that only handful of teams can win the flag. Some have already shouted that the season is over for teams – such as Sydney – just because they have a negative win loss record two months into the year.
However at this stage of the year there are a lot of caveats that need to be considered. Firstly, there are some real sample size issues. Teams have also played against very different opponent sets.
It’s still early, and things change. Some of the hottest teams have not yet faced the full weight of opposition analysis finding counters and exploiting their weaknesses. Other teams are starting to work on emergent flaws in their game. Some teams are starting to rally and settle, others maybe falling apart after early friskiness.
Work undertaken by Max Barry’s Squiggle power rankings shows us a more nuanced picture.
This paints a picture not too different to expectations at the start of the year. There’s a large group of 12 teams not too far apart from each other, separated as much by injury fortunes, close game luck, tactical quirks and scheduling as anything else.
Then, the universally expected three rebuilding stragglers at the bottom, and a group emerging who are struggling to keep pace – perhaps most surprisingly, including Melbourne.
The ladder doesn’t exactly lie, even at this relatively early stage. But it can do with some extra context.
This Week In Football we have:
Welcome back, Jack
Welcome back, Jack.
Not long ago on Twitter, I shared a strange little story from the margins of AFL history -a forgotten era, and a tale of a missing name.
Between 1965 and 2005, the AFL went through a major Jack shortage, a period that I now call The Jackless Era – a staggering 40-year stretch where the name Jack all but disappeared from the league.
It’s especially odd when you consider just how central Jacks once were to the game. Think Dyer. Titus, Clarke, Hawkins. These weren’t fringe players, Jacks were champions of the game. Then, suddenly, they vanished.
This wasn’t just a blip. It was a full-blown drought – a naming recession that stretched across generations. And while the game kept evolving, Jacks stayed behind.
At the peak, from 1939 to 1941, the AFL saw three consecutive years where 11 players named Jack – a full 25% of the field – took to the ground in a single game.
But sometime in the early 2000s, something shifted.
Demographer Mark McCrindle suggests Australians tend to bring names back from the past and have a preference to go for colloquial, down-to-earth names.
There could also be a generational skipping effect, where recent children are named after a grandparent or great grandparent.
Data suggests AFL names rolling in trend with US babies, albeit with a slight lag.
And one can’t help but see a role of the titular 1997 Oscar winning motion picture Titanic, with the heartthrob Jack Dawson playing a role.
Whatever the reason, Jack was back in cribs – and soon after, back in clubrooms.
By the mid 2010s, the Jack Renaissance had well and truly begun, and it has had non-insignificant impacts to win-rates.
Historically, of the 6,986 games of AFL played with a ‘Jack Differential’ (one team having more Jacks than the other), the more Jack-endowed team has won 50.4% of the time.
A basic regression suggests that each additional Jack your team has over the opponent increases your chance of winning by ~0.14%.
Now, the AFL is once again full of Jacks. St Kilda notably leading the charge. Jacks are to St Kilda as to lengthy headbanded blonde hair is to Geelong.
We even saw the greatest ‘Jack Off’ in the modern era occuring in Round 1, 2019 where St Kilda (6 Jacks) defeated Gold Coast (4 Jacks).
But not every club has embraced the return.
In fact, one club now holds a rather unwanted record: Essendon. The Bombers haven’t fielded a single Jack since 1980. That’s 45 years without a Jack – the longest current Jack-less streak.
It’s a curiosity. A coincidence? Maybe. But given their finals drought it might be starting to feel like a curse. Could a deliberate Jack recruitment strategy be the key to breaking Essendon’s drought?
Only time will tell. But for now, one thing’s for sure.
The Jacks are back and Essendon is on the clock.
Reports of the death of tackling have been greatly exaggerated
Jack Turner / TheBackPocketAU.com
It’s that wonderful time of year again. After 130 years of V/AFL football the tackle is dead, and with it goes the game we love.
You can’t even lay a good hard tackle anymore without being suspended, so how on earth are these players supposed to play the game – or so a handful of pundits (and North Melbourne players) would have you believe.
Or is this all a little bit much? Is the tackle really dead?
If I asked you what percentage of tackles this year had been deemed dangerous enough to warrant a penalty, what would you guess? What if I asked you what percentage had been deemed dangerous enough to warrant a suspension?
Would you guess 5%?
Maybe a little more conservative and guess 1%?
Well, we painstakingly went through all of the rough conduct reports from the start of 2024 to find which ones were dangerous tackles, and either of those guesses would be way off.
Just 0.1% of tackles have been cited this year – the same as it was for the whole of 2024. And of those 33,000 tackles since the beginning of 2024 just 0.04% have resulted in a suspension.
That’s around one in every two and a half thousand tackles.
Is it true that the matrix could take more things into consideration? Sure, but with the knowledge we now have around concussions, when tackling you have a duty of care to your opponent.
Tom Atkins has placed a record pace 76 tackles so far this season without having been cited once. Last year H&A leader Matt Rowell and overall leader James Rowbottom both went the whole season without so much as a fine. So it certainly is possible.
*Data taken from available footage of rough conduct charges on MRO reports and checking match video for incidents
Taking the Foot off the Pedal
Approximately halfway through the last quarter of Saturday’s clash between the Lions and Saints, Zac Bailey slotted his 3rd goal of the day to extend the lead to over six goals. If there was the faintest sliver of hope for a comeback up to this moment, it had just been extinguished.
It left everybody in the ground with the question of what they do with the last remaining ten minutes of play.
For Jonathan Brown and Dermott Brereton the answer from the Brisbane perspective was obvious: put the foot down.
They were clearly the better team on the day, and now they had an opponent with nothing left to play for. It was obvious to both commentators that they should boost their percentage, as about half of the top eight places would come down to a tiebreaker from teams on equal premiership points.
Instead of piling on the score, though, the Lions largely just saw the game out. They stopped chasing or applying as much pressure as they had been. The Lions put on another three goals but let another three through.
This allowed St Kilda their highest quarter score of the night, and the margin ended up in much the same place as when Bailey put the game to bed.
This decision to preserve energy isn’t unique to Chris Fagan. Last weekend also saw:
- After completing a streak of twelve unanswered goals, Gold Coast brought key players to the bench and conceded their first major in nearly an hour against Sydney.
- Following their dominant third quarter the Bulldogs gave their captain and current best player in the game the last term off.
- Most conspicuous was Melbourne’s decision to rest their captain and allow Richmond to score the last four goals of the game.
None of these decisions put the potential result of the game into question, but they all cost their team an opportunity to increase their percentage.
It’s likely they’d made the same observation of a trend around percentage: it’s exceedingly rare for percentage to come into play, and even rarer for it to have any consequences.
Of the 234 ladder positions decided in the 18-team era, 71 belonged to teams who had fallen behind another on percentage. Of those 71, only 20 made a difference in September.
Broken down further, the most common consequence is missing a home final in the first week (i.e., teams finishing 3rd, 4th, 7th or 8th on the same number of points as 1st, 2nd, 5th or 6th). Only four teams in the last 13 seasons have realised the nightmare scenario of missing finals completely because of their inability to run up the score on their day, or play out the four quarters on their opponent’s.
When put side by side a clear trend can be seen in the variability between where percentage will put a team on the ladder:
…and where collecting premiership points will put you:
With the introduction of the Opening Round, Gather Round, and the pre-finals bye, men’s seasons are longer than ever measured both by games played and the days between the first and last bounce. Players are also expected to cover more distance at higher speed, with less opportunities for a spell on the bench.
For teams aiming to go deep into September, they now need to not only manage the games they’re in, but the weeks and months ahead as well.
While you may see coaches flip magnets around, even so egregiously that their counterparts take exception to it, we’re unlikely to see teams breaking any scoring records in the near future.
The showdown lowdown
Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com
Want to really annoy some people? Make a list.
It seems we’re in marquee season right now. We’ve got the Q-Clash and the Sydney Derby coming up this week, and across the last two weeks we had the Easter and ANZAC matches.
What better time to rile everyone up by ranking the various marquee fixtures across the league.
I’ve detailed my methodology over at CreditToDuBois if you want to have a look, but I’ll present the end results here.
In brief, I’ve ranked each clash across the last 10 instances across criteria of competitiveness (50%), investment from fans (25%) and investment from players (25%) to come up with a completely objective and scientifically rigorous order.
The methodology linked above goes into far more detail about how I reached these rankings, but this gives a quick overview of how the different components contributed.
What it’s like doing a post-match press conference
Cody Atkinson
There was a fair bit of discussion about AFL post game press conferences this week, especially around the confrontation between Ross Lyon and Gemma Bastiani.
Full disclosure: I’ve collaborated with Gemma in the past and she’s one of the best minds in football media going IMO.
I’ve been paid to go to the football for several years now, including getting the opportunity to learn from coaches. Given the discussions of the week, I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about how at least one journalist sees the process.
The game after the game
After the siren blows the next phase of a football game begins. If football is the action, the post game is the reaction.
Fans tend to look for either the exits from the ground or the way onto the field for kick to kick. The players eventually float towards the rooms to get a brief debrief before cooling down in front of the inner circle, friends and family.
Staff and security start to pack down and secure the venue, turning the haven of activity into a ghost town once again.
A small handful of individuals head the other way, into a typically dark hidden room in the bowels of the grandstands.
The results are typically broadcasted live across the nation and uploaded to youtube shortly after.
This is what happens at an AFL post-game media conference.
Before it begins journalists tend to work up their questions. Sean and I tend to dial up our data and look if it matches with trends we’ve observed across the game. We also try to weave any questions interested onlookers have fed us through the match.
The sound and camera guys have to set the room up beforehand, with one inevitably playing the role of coach. Journalists that are kicking around often help set the room up at smaller grounds.
Different journalists have different motivations at these events. Most are there for filing match reports or instant analysis for quick consumption. Very occasionally you’ll see someone from the host broadcaster down to dominate the early proceedings – a practice that seems to have stopped in recent years. There’s a few that are looking to fill out articles about broader topics of the day – think reaction to tackles or the like.
Even rarer still are journalists who are looking at deeper issues or trying to fill insights for other articles. That’s where Sean and I usually fall.
That means generally you’ll see three different types of questions:
- Surface level on the who, what, where of a game, including injury concerns.
- “Gotcha” questions trying to get a quote to base a “topic of the day” article on.
- More strategic, deeper questions on how footy is played in 2025 and the roles of different players.
Coaches also have different motivations in these press conferences. They realise that, due to the potential audience, they have some responsibility to provide an explanation for what we have just seen.
For losing coaches, there’s always a natural undertone of disappointment and anger. Winning coaches are almost always happier.
When the cameras are on.
It’s important to note that the behaviours of both coaches and journalists tend to shift before cameras are turned on and once they are turned off. There’s joking, light tomfoolery and the like. It’s a workplace, after all.
Speaking their language
As someone who tends to ask the more strategic questions, it often takes time to signal to coaches the line I want to take. As it differs from the usual line of questioning, making sure that language and terminology that Sean and I use is correct is critical.
I got it embarrassingly wrong once with Sam Mitchell, using lingo from another club to try to talk about the Hawks’ choices.
The one thing I’ve learned from doing it for the last few years is just how willing coaches are to just talk about how footy is played (within reason). Once they know they can talk about spares, stoppage, swinging the ball and spreads, they are extremely willing to elaborate. They – like most reading this – are footy nuffs or nerds.
I’ve also talked to Ross Lyon, who gave me a similar “grilling” when we started asking questions. Like last week’s press conference, the Saints had just lost a game. I was relatively prepared, and able to swing it back where I wanted to go (including getting a couple of quotes I needed for upcoming pieces) but there was a moment of uncertainty at the start. It felt like a battle, but a fun one.
I understand Ross may have enjoyed it too, especially as we started to get into the nitty gritty more.
But my motivations were pretty different to most journos, and certainly to the role that Gemma would have played at the presser. It’s an odd task – asking about how someone just publicly lost.
In my reading that press conference would have been far better if Ross engaged with the questions straight up, and given Gemma the chance to ask follow ups (or lead her there). But I also didn’t lose by 45 points in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands of people.
Overall, some see the process as a waste but I strongly disagree. I’m very biased though.
The best kicks: Are the most threatening and the safest kicks the same players?
Sean Lawson
Last week Liam showed off his updated alternative to the AFL’s kicking efficiency stat, where two values, kicking threat and kicking retention, show how damaging players are compared to the average for their kicking context, and how well they retain the ball. This got me thinking about to what extent these two types of “good kicking” come from the same players.
The top quartile of most frequent kicks (currently having at least 67 kicks so far this year) are spread across all points of the spectrum, but it’s relatively rare for high volume kickers to be equally very strong on both score threat and ball retention. This stands to reason – it requires a player to produce scores from their kicks at a rate elevated from usual for their position, and also to have kicks that don’t get turned over as often as typical. Balancing safety and threat is hard, since intuitively players generally need to take risks to lead to scoring, but those risks also raise turnover potential.
Pat Lipinski, a key linking component of Collingwood’s ladder leading play, currently sits at the top in terms of combined threat and retention rating, with other standouts including the all-rounder Isaac Heeney, and Dylan Moore and Isaac Cumming, both also members of very effective offensive midfield/forward setups.
At the other end of the scale, perhaps fairly emblematic of Melbourne’s issues with the ball, Christian Petracca is using it much less threateningly and with more turnovers than would be expected from where and how he’s operating. He’s never been a high retention player but his threat rating is through the floor in 2025.
Three other things we can observe looking at the quartile of players who kick the most are:
- A bit over a third of high-volume kickers are both threat and retention positive, what we might consider to be the all round effective kickers.
- Most are better than average on at least one side of the ledger. Only a quarter of the 100 most frequent kickers were negative for both threat and retention
- Safe but less threatening kickers are more common than the reverse.
This all tends to suggest that despite the clear difference between kicking to avoid turnovers, and kicking to produce scoring opportunities, the two skills aren’t entirely separate from each other.
Around the Grounds
Here’s some more stuff that isn’t from here but is good to take in about footy
- Max Barry, creator of the premier website for footy modelling Squiggle, is launching a footy roguelike deck builder game
- Madi Chwasta at the ABC covered the comedy accountability project that took down a sportsbet ad campaign by simply reporting the outcome of the bets they promoted
- According to Channel 7, GWS are exploring selling a home game to be played at the MCG
Leave a Reply