This Week In Football

Author: Joe Cordy

  • Round 4, 2026

    Round 4, 2026

    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.

    Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

    20 minutes

    Before the Bounce

    Big weekend of footy for xScore enjoyers.

    Geelong proved you can win on sheer volume of looks at the goal, GWS showed everyone regresses to the mean eventually, and Fremantle showed bad kicking can still be 10-goal winning footy.

    There’s also a new era of cellar dwellers.

    After spending most of the decade battling each other for the right to first pick, North Melbourne and West Coast won in the same weekend for what feels like the entire history of the league.

    Not to be outdone though, Carlton set up the laziest content creator you can think of with a slam dunk April Fool’s post.

    This week in football we have:

    Is a Bad Ruck Better Than No Ruck?

    Joe Cordy / @JCordy37

    In November last year Fremantle went riffling through other clubs’ discarded players, and fished out the last remaining and arguably only successful product of a long forgotten push to open a new frontier in international recruitment: the 211cm 34-year-old former Division I NCAA basketballer and OSU alumni Mason Cox. 

    Despite putting up his most lacklustre season since recruitment, battling injury and being right near the typical expiry date for professional athletes, Fremantle saw enough in him to offer Cox a 2-year deal.

    The reason for it is pretty simple: Cox is one of the few players in the incredibly slim venn diagram of those willing to accept a contract knowing they’ll never be called on without an injury or suspension to a player higher up the depth chart, and who has proven he can actually fulfill the role of a ruck at AFL level to any capacity.

    With Luke Jackson and Sean Darcy at the core of their current build towards an inaugural flag, the footy department felt they needed to avoid the exact situation their Round 3 opponents found themselves in: a selection panel so bereft of ruck options you’re forced to play two 195cm players in the role. But how did Richmond find themselves in this position, and how big an advantage was it for Fremantle?

    great gear to have a game where we really needed our ruck to silence the critics and have a bit of a confidence booster, and our opponents just didn’t play a ruck

    – Fremantle fan and Frenemy of the Newsletter Mimi Birch

    Height Distribution in League

    I’ve never once bought into the idea of there being not enough talent to distribute across the league, an argument we’re now seeing again with the looming spectre of Tasmania and the high likelihood of a 20th team. The one exception to this might be in finding genuinely good rucks, or even just athletes tall enough to fit the bill. 

    Let’s say you’re searching for a new ruck from outside the league or the national draft to bring onto your list. Australia in 2026 has an estimated population of approximately 27,000,000 people; of that, just over a fifth are in the typical professional athlete age range of 20-34, and just under half of them are male. If you then screen for just those men who are at least as tall as the shortest established AFL ruck currently in the league (198cm), you’re putting a line through 99.98% of potential candidates. Some development and investment into them as a player is to be expected, but you’d ideally like them to be currently playing footy in any capacity, which the ABS estimates is just 1 in every 50 men. 

    After filtering for just those that meet the minimum height requirement, are in the right age range, and have at least basic understanding of the game, you’re left with a pool of approximately 1200 potential recruits in the country, or 0.004% of the population. Despite this, every club in the league finds space for at least two rucks on their list, even if there’s never space for more than a pair of best-23 capable players. 

    It’s for this reason that rucks are especially sticky on lists. They typically take years to make it from being handed a jumper on Draft Night to one on debut, and are virtually the only players list managers don’t cut after 30 when you’re not getting regular time in the seniors. 

    The Efficacy of the Ruck Tap

    The hit out numbers were, as you might expect, a completely one-sided affair. If Richmonds Campbell Grey and Mikelti Lafau had managed to combine to win as many as they have thus far in their career, they’d still be behind what Darcy and Jackson won individually on the day. 

    Even though they were soundly beaten around the ground and in the ruck contests, the other metrics we typically use to measure stoppage attack didn’t reflect the same uncompetitiveness.

    In 2022 Cody Atkinson and Sean Lawson, friends of mine and yours, published an article in the ABC focusing on Port Adelaide’s ruckless setup with Jeremy Finlayson taking the hit outs. They showed that through the previous five seasons there had been little correlation between hit out margins and the score, but a rather large one when it came to clearances. Updated for 2023-2025 numbers and the numbers look extremely similar. 

    Hit outs have strong diminishing returns…

    …while dominating clearance has significant positive returns. 

    The issue is how few hit outs won go directly to the advantage of a teammate. In 2025 the AFL average was 10.4 from 97.8 ruck contests a game. Even Fremantle’s twin towers were only able to combine for 12 per game. 

    Teams, even bad teams like Richmond currently are, are simply too sophisticated to let anyone create them in high volume. Most rucks at AFL-level can at least put enough pressure on their opponent to stop them putting it perfectly into the hit zone, or if they can’t their teammates learn to read it off the opposition’s hands.

    If you’re familiar with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, you were probably immediately aware the answer was “No.” Rucks are still valuable, good rucks especially, but ironically it’s for everything outside of the ruck contests. You need them to be able to provide a presence post-clearance, whether it be aerially like Gawn or at ground-level like Grundy; there’s no point to having some lumbering running around the ground if he’s not providing any follow up. If you’re fresh out of the non-lumbering kind, a pair like Gray and Lefau are as good a solution as any.

    Age isn’t a number (it’s a scatter plot)

    Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois

    (Credit to Sean for the title)

    There’s a lot of ways to measure how old a club’s playing group is. This week I came across one of the more unique methods – just removing the three oldest players (each important contributors) from one club and comparing it to the raw figures for the other clubs.

    Yes, it turns out that if you exclude the oldest players from one teams list and include the oldest players in every other team’s lists your rankings will change. If you apply the same logic across the league however Collingwood is still the oldest.

    Now three is an arbitrary number but even so it produces some interesting results, just not with Collingwood. By excluding the top three players in every list’s mean age Geelong go from ranked 2nd oldest to 10th! That’s a massive change and shows that underneath Dangerfield, Stanley, and Blicavs they’re around the competition average. In the other direction Gold Coast have an even bigger change going from 4th youngest to 3rd oldest, despite taking 6 players in last year’s National Draft. In between Witts, Collins, and Holman at the top and their academy crop at the bottom they’ve got a mass of prime age players at their disposal.

    One criticism of looking at mean (what people are most commonly talking about when they say average) is it’s susceptible to outliers. We can also look at lists by median – if you line the players up by age, how old would the player in the middle be. If a team has a pretty even distribution the mean and median will be similar. If a team has a handful of super-veterans you’d expect the median age to come in lower, while if they’ve got literal babies crawling around on the park the median will bring it up.

    There’s a lot more variation in how old you can be in the AFL than how young (minimum draft ages), so by using median we’re usually controlling for the impact of a group of particularly old players and we’d expect the movements to be similar to excluding the top three. The big exception here is Essendon, by mean they’ve got the 3rd youngest list, by median they’ve got the 6th oldest which leads us to a quick diversion.

    Checking out the distribution of ages we can see a gaping hole around their 22 year olds, between Archer May (21.35 years old at the start of the year) and Liam McMahon (23.67 years old).

    If we look at Essendon’s list build chart (each team covered in Round 0’s edition of TWIF) we can see why. Nic Martin (Supplementary selection period), Elijah Tsatas (Pick 5) and Lewis Hayes (Pick 25) are the only players still on Essendon’s list from the 2021 and 2022 draft periods.

    Ben Hobbs (Pick 13), Alastair Lord (46), Garret McDonagh (50), Alwyn and Jayden Davey (Picks 45 and 54), Tex Wanganeen (SSP), Jye Menzie and Jaiden Hunter (Mid-Season draft), Anthony Munkara (Zone selection), and Rhett Montgomerie (Rookie Draft) are all gone from the AFL now.

    Patrick Voss (Rookie draft) was delisted and subsequently recruited by Fremantle, while Massimo D’Ambrosio (Mid-season Draft) was traded to Hawthorn.

    Their other list additions from those two years are Jake Kelly (Free agent), Will Setterfield and Sam Weideman (Trades). Only Setterfield is still in the AFL, although after being delisted and picked back up through the SSP.

    Aside from Ben Hobbs none of the players gone cost a lot to bring in individually. You can’t guarantee a star or even a solid role player from those picks. When you’re throwing that many darts though you need at least a few to hit, otherwise you end up with holes in your list.

    The next way we could look at ages is based on selected sides. Having a few 30+ year olds on your list that act as useful depth and provide leadership off-field (Tom McDonald) is very different to your game revolving around them (Max Gawn).

    Using mean the big mover is Gold Coast – expected as they’ve got a mass of young players dragging down the list average, while the sides they are picking week to week are relatively mature.

    If we move to median Hawthorn jumps out, going from the fourth youngest median list to the 2nd oldest median selected team. Essendon and Melbourne move down quite a bit by this measure too, as do Fremantle fielding the second youngest sides.

    Finally looking at how things stack up historically, I’ve taken a look at ages of selected teams across the first 3 games of a season.

    It’s unsurprising that Collingwood’s median age across the first three games is the oldest it has ever fielded. Another nine teams have been in the 80th percentile or above for oldest teams they’ve fielded, with Carlton the oldest they’ve been since 1944.

    League-wide it’s the 7th oldest and a trend emerges with 2023, 2024, and 2025 coming in between 8th and 11th oldest. We haven’t had a particularly young season since the introduction of Gold Coast and GWS in 2011 and 2012.

    And inspired by Max Gawn’s milestone game on the weekend I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the rate of players achieving milestones has changed over the years.

    An important note, this last chart excludes players who never played a career game. I don’t believe there’s a convenient long-term listing of team lists year by year, so I’ve used the game stats from AFL Tables to capture anyone with at least one career game.

    Opening Round Competitive Advantage

    Seb Morrison / Changing Angle

    There should be no competitive advantage in teams having played a game before they play another team [that hasn’t]

    Justin Longmuir following his team’s Round 1 loss to Geelong

    It’s been a fortnight since the entirety of the football world espoused their views on Justin Longmuir’s Opening Round comments, ranging from affirmation to condescension to whatever it was that Caro went with. Through all the noise and hyperbole, there seemed to be lacking anyone able to assert in empirical terms whether JL was accurate. Fortunately, we live in a world of clever people and big data sets. Unfortunately, those clever people have better things to deal with, so here I am to have a go instead.

    The validity of Longmuir’s position is of tepid interest to most people, including myself, however it does provide a nice segue into a more general discussion regarding the extant ‘Competitive Advantages’ in the AFL. This is a meatier, far more interesting conversation, and one that I’ll look to expound on throughout the season in TWIF and elsewhere. For now, let’s peruse the supposed advantages enjoyed by participants of the now maligned Opening Round.

    The general assertion made by Longmuir alludes to the disparity in athletic capacity experienced by teams in their first game of a season and their second. Throughout the media, most ex-players seemed to concur that the first game of the season is more challenging on an aerobic level, before berating Longmuir for saying so.

    GPS data going from 2017 is summarised below to show the following increase in athletic output from a team’s first game to their second. I’ve highlighted four measures of athletic output; total distance ran, high speed distance, total sprints and repeat sprints.

    Teams do not seem to cover any additional distance in their second game of the season as compared to their first, but the explosive work does experience an uptick. On a ten-year data set, a marginal but persistent increase in high-speed distances of 5.3%, sprints by 4.5% and repeat sprints by 5.7% are evident.

    Round one of 2026 saw six opportunities for this statistic evidence to play out. Six Opening Round participants played their second game against a side supposedly still blowing off high-speed cobwebs. Dropping total distance, the results on our three remaining measures are below.

    Sprints

    High Speed Distance

    Repeat Sprints

    In round one, every team playing game two more distance at high speed than their season-opening opponent. Total sprints exhibit a similar disparity, with the average brought down by a woefully unathletic Carlton. Interestingly, repeat sprints seem to exhibit no real correlation for the 2026 games.

    Fourth quarter data provides a similar overall picture, with teams in their second run outperforming opponents across all athletic categories. The difference certainly doesn’t inspire a royal commission and again, Carlton provide a distinct athletic outlier. Shown below, teams seem far more capable of repeat sprints in fourth quarters in their second game. The other measures show slight overall upticks from game one to two.

    Sprints

    High Speed Distance

    Repeat Sprints

    Although marginal, GPS data does support Justin Longmuir’s claim to a competitive advantage in round one games where an Opening Round participant opposes a non-participant. The advantage enjoyed by the beneficiary has not shown itself to be definitive in 2026, with results falling in favour of Adelaide and Melbourne, however in both of those games the team with the supposed athletic advantage were ascendant in the final quarter.

    The benefit at hand for Opening Round participants is not wholly captured by athletic data. Although harder to quantify, decision making and skill execution is clearly done under more duress by teams in their first few games compared to later in the year.

    As if they were intentionally doing so, the AFL have managed to elaborate on the advantages gifted to Opening Round participants by instituting a subsequent early round bye. The deformity made to the schedule with the inclusion of “Round 0” has managed to bleed as far into the fixture as round four, with GWS and St Kilda’s enjoying a week off. The rest is significant, almost all Opening Round participants are nursing significant injuries, with GWS the most afflicted of any team in the competition. How would Adelaide enjoy a week off now, reducing the games of actual football they would have to endure without some key personnel. Instead, injuries to the likes of Petracca, McCluggage, Taylor and Heeney will impact their respective teams less than injuries at the same stage of the season to Dawson, Young and others.

    In short, participation in the Opening Round is a narrow but real advantage to those teams over the rest of the competition. With the expansion to include two standalone Victorian teams, the AFL has undermined their ability to justify such an arbitrary distribution of competitive advantage. With the best teams from the season prior selected to play Washington Wizards to the northern states Harlem Globetrotters, the stratification of the league is institutionally endorsed by the AFL in order to satisfy strategic goals that are no longer entirely clear.

    The AFL Needs a Better Clash Policy

    Jack Turner / The Back Pocket

    On Saturday Morning, the Brisbane Lions ran out onto the turf of Docklands Stadium wearing a crisp and aesthetically pleasing retro jumper – a redesign of the Fitzroy kit worn by club legend Kevin Murray through the majority of his 333 game career. A beautiful deep maroon and navy blue with white monogram, in a style the club hasn’t worn as their retro kit for nearly a decade. The only problem is they chose to wear this much darker and redder kit against St Kilda, a team who wear predominantly black jumpers with red and white.

    Former captain Dayne Zorko even spoke to 3AW after the game about the obvious confusion it was creating for players and fans alike: “We will start with the jumper clash. I don’t know how they approved that? Early on everyone was coming off saying, “We just don’t know who to kick it to?” Thankfully we had the white shorts on and as the game slowed up and opened up a bit you could identify it but, I tell you what it was difficult.” 

    The key question here is “I don’t know how they approved that?”. A question that gets asked many times throughout the season, as the main difference clubs typically make to differ between their home and clash kit is a colour inversion and swapping between dark or white shorts – sometimes, confusingly, even for clubs without white on their jumper.

    Remarkably, despite being more than 100 years into being a distinct standalone competition and more than 25 years into the AFL era; AFL House didn’t even have a clash policy until 2007. The AFL now technically has the final say on approving the playing kit that teams run out in every week, but as we saw on the weekend this system clearly isn’t particularly effective.

    The feedback from … many different stakeholders has led the AFL to mandate, as part of its rules, that all clubs must have an alternative clash guernsey for the 2007 season onwards.

    The AFL has informed clubs that the final design of an alternate guernseys, which are to be used only in the event of a clash when the side is the away team, need to be completed by May 31, to be ready for the following season.

    The key consideration for the AFL before any design is approved is whether the guernsey design provides a clear visual difference to the uniforms of other clubs for people at the game and watching at home on television.

    The guidelines they released seem good in theory, but they are rarely – if ever – strictly enforced.

    Part of the problem of course, is that the game is faster than ever, so players are making split second decisions, and fans are also trying to follow the rapid rate of ball movement amongst dozens of moving players. In a time of plumbers and accountants moving at weekend footy pace, this was less of an issue. So what’s the answer?

    The first solution here would be to have someone employed by AFL house – preferably an expert on colour theory, and not a former player or executive – whose job it is to assess the jumpers proposed by each team to be worn on that weekend for both on camera and in person contrast, and make a final decision on if the away team needs to change their preferred strip.

    The second would be to ensure that each club has a third, completely distinct jumper as part of their standard rotation that they would wear when they are the away team and their standard away kit would still create too much of a clash. Ideally the key guideline here would be that it could be completely distinguishable from both the team’s home and away jumpers if worn in a game against them – think how Carlton’s all-white kit and all-navy kit might both create a clash with Collingwood or Geelong, but their infamous yellow M&M jumper would contrast with both.

    A great example is this three-kit setup from the Queens Park Rangers that I stumbled upon recently that they have as their standard issue uniforms for the 2025/26 Championship in England. There is almost certainly no team whose kit would clash with all three of these shirts, meaning there would be no risk of a clash regardless of opponent.

    In a league where there are a near-endless number of jumpers being produced and sold, from Gather Round “stealth” guernseys, to ANZAC guernseys, Sir Doug Nicholls Round guernseys, Retro guernseys, and other one-off promotional guernseys; why wouldn’t clubs take the opportunity to design and sell a third style of jumper each year? 

    It would also give complete creative freedom to clash with other teams home colours, meaning the natural flow on effect of this would be that Port Adelaide would be free to wear their Prison Bars jumper for home games if they so desired, and Fremantle could wear their South Fremantle or East Fremantle heritage guernseys without drawing the ire of Sydney or North Melbourne.

    In a league where we have seen numerous rule changes, interpretation tweaks, and medical policy changes to adapt to the increasing speed and demands of the game, it is well past time that we developed a strict clash policy that ensured we no longer have to endure matchups like we witnessed last Saturday.

  • Round 3, 2026

    Round 3, 2026

    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.

    Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

    Before the Bounce

    Round 2 of the season, so naturally four teams had a bye this weekend and there won’t be a full slate until Gather Round. The teams that get out onto the park though put on some great displays, only leaving us with two undefeated and three winless sides and half the competition sitting at 1-1.

    The Hawks, Dogs and Suns all firmed their premiership credentials displaying three distinct archetypes of wins that hearten the faithful: straightening your kicking for goal when it matters, wrestling back the lead late on in tough away conditions, and completely dispatching cellar dweller opposition.

    At the other end of the ladder the Giants, Bombers and Roos all had three variations of disappointing losses: the complete absurdity of losing 29 seconds of game time to the void and going on to lose by a single goal in a late charge, cementing yourself as wooden spoon favourites after being unable to fire a single shot against a fellow bottom four team, and giving up a five goal lead to a team you sold the reverse fixture hosting rights to.

    Finally in the middle of the pack, maybe now called the Wildcard Zone, Fremantle showed they learned how to hold onto the most dangerous lead in football: 5+ goals at QT.

    This week in football we have:

    Rescuing Footy

    Cody Atkinson

    Footy – or Australian Football to give it its government name – has been around a fair while. 

    But the game as created wasn’t perfect. The first rules were more a rough sketch than a considered masterpiece. 

    That’s not a shock – they were literally bashed out on a lazy arvo at the pub by whoever was keen enough to show up. Had they considered continuing through kick-ons they might have had something bulletproof on their hands, but c’est la vie.

    Since then there has been an obsession with fixing football. As something created broken, the obvious response has been to repair. When the little mark took over the game, they removed it from the rules. Holding the ball has been an issue for over a century, as has the throw. The shirt front is no more, and now the ground has a lot more lines than before.

    There are three general types of fixes that are generally enacted.

    The first is safety related changes, and are pretty essential for any sport to continue (i.e. no shirtfronts anymore). The second is loophole closing – think the little mark. That occurs where a team or teams exploit a poorly written law to reign supreme (and ruin the fun of the game).

    The third type is a bit more nebulous – it’s to make the game better. In recent years there have been several changes to attempt to improve the game. That’s also the case this year.

    That last type of change rumbled around my head when I read this tweet from the Herald Sun’s ‘Ralphy’.

    Imagine being a fly on the wall in those conversations. Imagine thinking that a bunch of journos with a questionable grip on the sport knew the levers on how to fix the sport.

    Most importantly – imagine thinking those trade-offs were something real.

    So is the game actually improved this year?

    It’s far too early to tell, but almost certainly not. 

    Most of the baseline numbers that indicate style are basically unchanged this year, especially when considering that early season (and year) footy is usually faster and higher scoring due to conditions. Most club analysts generally think that a month to six weeks is the earliest period you need before trends are analysed in a footy context – we aren’t close to there yet. Some even suggest to wait until after the league-wide bye. That’s because the bye is the main opportunity teams have to install new looks with extra time on the training track.

    As we’ve (Sean Lawson and I) have investigated in the past, most rule changes see a short term bump to scoring (or other relevant factors) before settling. Time is needed for the full impact.

    But let’s be bold and take one short term example anyway – mostly because of the consensus view that there has been a dramatic change. In Mateo’s latest One Percenters newsletter, he highlighted some numbers from TWIF’s own Emlyn Breese:

    Play on rates – often cited as the big outcome from “stand” – haven’t shifted dramatically. Likewise, transition of the ball from defensive 50 to attacking 50 is actually a touch down. Scoring from centre bounce is down as well. Scoring is up overall (see Lincoln’s piece for a discussion there), but the game looks (with the commentary on mute) largely the same as last year’s sport.

    Yet still most people would observe the opposite. They would see a game dramatically sped up, perhaps artificially so. So far that’s just not the case.

    A large chunk of this would be down to what we are watching for – a filter on how we watch the game through the narrow lens of the television screen. If we are looking for overlap run (and commentators likewise) then we will see it.

    This Russell Jackson piece is always worth re-reading on the latter issue.

    That addresses the “what” but not the “why”.

    So “why”? Why are these rule changes being made if not for the big two reasons above?

    Well, without detailed research, my best guess is to serve the nostalgia of journalists like Ralph and the footy administrators in charge. They want a game like the one they remembered growing up, with hormones racing through their veins. They want to see the loose, carefree, energetic footy that matched their outlook in life that the time – when things were as good as they would ever be.

    This absolute tune from Hot Tubs Time Machine probably explains it better than I ever could.

    People want goals, action, marks. They want bags of goals – journos in particular want this because it’s easy to write about. More importantly, they want to relive the heroes of their youth and what they did to make them so, well, heroic.

    Marcus from Hot Tubs unintentionally touches on one of the major factors in why we don’t – the professionalism of the sport. As the sport has become more of a going concern the tolerance for racism, sexism and homophobia has significantly reduced. 

    So too has the tolerance for losing, especially if your career depends on winning. That’s a reason why there has been such a rapid tactical evolution, alongside the impact of other sports. That drive for professionalism and improvement drives both aspects. Perhaps there’s a way to make the game as open as the 1980s or 1920s (yuck in both respects), but “stand”, ruck jumping, 6-6-6 and last touch out of bounds don’t scratch the surface.

    Unfortunately, the march of time is as unrelenting as the receding of the hairline up the scalp. If you actually go back and watch old football (as I often do) you’ll be quickly reminded how barely watchable it is. The conditions are often bad, the skills often lacking and the strategy oft rudimentary. It’s the emotions that are worth remembering, not the actual footy sometimes.

    But old footy is simpler to understand than the modern game – an output of the professionalism forced on the game, influenced by those who communicate it to the masses.

    That’s not really an issue – especially when more fans are watching the sport than ever before, and when more people are playing at a grassroots level. If the game was truly in dire straits these numbers would have dropped off.

    Footy always needs fixing, but maybe not in the way people have been thinking they need to.

    The Shifting Marking Market

    Jeremiah Brown

    Marks are a central component of the beautiful game of football. While there have been minor increases in marks per game over time, going back to 2012, the total number of marks per game have hovered between 88 through to 94 per game. Total marks have also remained quite stable as a ratio to disposals per game, shifting slightly from 24% up to around 25% post stand rule. 

    However, not all marks are created equal and it is important to look at different types of marks. In a game where the importance of maintaining possession and transitioning the ball quickly has exploded, the craft of getting open and providing an easy marking target out on a lead is a precious commodity that is growing in prominence this season. 

    With the caveat that it is extremely early, this season there is an interesting spike in the marks being taken on leads by teams. For the first time since 2014, teams are averaging more marks on leads than contested marks. This is partially because marks on leads are up to the highest they have been over the last 15 years, and partially because contested marks are at the lowest rate that they have been over the same period.

    The increased speed and openness of the game could be contributing to both factors. For contested marks per game, with the ball more in motion, there are fewer instances where players are looking to put the ball into contested situations. On the flipside, there is also increased space to lead into when the ball is moving quicker, creating more opportunities for players to lead effectively. 

    Even so, last year contested marks were still more common than marks on the lead. St Kilda and Sydney were the only teams that took more marks on the lead than contested marks. For both teams it was more about being poor at contested marking than being leaders at marks on leads, and both teams raided Carlton to try and improve their contested marking in the offseason.

    This year though the ratio of marks has flipped, and teams are taking more marks on the lead than they are taking contested marks. There are 12 teams averaging at least 10 marks on leads, a number which hasn’t been reached by a team since Collingwood did it in 2021. 

    Given the small sample size it’s hard to work out how much of Port Adelaide’s total up the top is due to a change in play style under Carr, and how much is due to totally dominating a poor Essendon defence this last weekend. Essendon conceded 7 marks on the lead to Mitch Georgiades alone, and is averaging 21 per game conceded to opponents. 

    Only two teams are getting more of the ball from contested marks than marks on the lead. Creating easier ball movement remains an issue for Carlton, who are one of the two teams continuing to get more from contested marks rather than marks on the lead. However, Sydney taking more contested marks is a bit of a surprise, given they were the worst in the competition at it in 2025.

    There are a few contributing factors for Sydney. The first factor this week was the loss of Gulden and Heeney, which certainly hurt both the run and the ball movement of the Swans. The other has been the relatively low output from star recruit Charlie Curnow. Sydney recruited Curnow to help provide aerial support and fill their need for a key forward, but following on from a down year last year, he continues to be down on his peak output, with his worst marking numbers since his rookie season in 2026. Curnow might look to the man from the other end of the field last week if he wants to return to form. 

    Last year the renaissance of Jack Gunston was one of the more surprising stories in football. Gunston has always had a knack for finding space and working to the right areas in the forward line. But last year’s resurgence came in part off the back of leading the competition in marks taken on the lead, with Gunston being the only player to average more than 2 per game. Gunston was able to translate his ability to find space into significant scoreboard impact, trailing only Jeremy Cameron in Goals per game last season.

    In the first few rounds Gunston has continued on from where he left off last season. He has been a joy to watch plying his trade in the front half of the ground, continually working himself into dangerous areas and testing the concentration of his defender. He was pivotal in the win against the Swans last week, and is once again second with 4.3 goals per game and averaging an impressive 2.7 marks on the lead per game. 

    Whether it is the stand rule, or just pulling insights from what worked last year for Hawthorn and Gunston, it seems teams are looking to get out on the lead more. It means that Gunston’s got a bit more company with 25 players who are averaging 2 or more marks on the lead so far. Those numbers will certainly come down as defences adapt to the increased speed that we have seen early in the season, and as Essendon’s porous defence improves from historically bad levels. However, the early numbers suggest a genuine shift in how teams are working and using space that it will be interesting to see if teams look to clamp down on in the coming weeks.

    The Early Season Spike in Scoring isn’t as Big as you Think it is

    Lincoln Tracy

    Earlier this week Jon Pierik wrote an article for The Age exploring whether the AFL’s latest batch of rule changes have bought about the desired effect and led to more scoring.

    “While not all teams have played three games, the bump in scoring is obvious,” Pierik wrote. “When comparing the average scores across the first three rounds of this season and last, there’s an increase of five points per team, to 90 points.”

    And that’s true, if you round up.

    If you compare the average team score across the first three rounds of this season compared to the first three rounds of last season (excluding the rescheduled Geelong/Brisbane and Gold Coast/Essendon games from Opening Round, as these weren’t played until Rounds 3 and 24, respectively), things have increased from 90.2 to 94.98.

    (Pierik may have made a typo at the start of the article when saying the average for this season is 90 points – the figure towards the end of the story says 95.)

    But when I posted about seeing this story on X, fellow TWIFer Emlyn Breese weighed in with two very valid points.

    The first point was that with so few games played across the first three weeks of the season, it’s important to acknowledge that four of the six teams that have played three games (instead of two games, like the other 12 teams) are in the top five for average points scored at this point of the season.

    Gold Coast (384 points, three games, average of 128 per game) have the highest average score, ahead of Hawthorn and the Western Bulldogs (339 points, three games, 113 per game), Fremantle (218 points, two games, 109 per game), and Sydney (318 points, three games, 106 per game).

    The second point is that it would be better to test whether scoring (and some of the other offensive metrics) have improved on last year by taking an average of the team averages, rather than simply dividing the total number of points scored by the number of teams that have played.

    Emlyn’s suggestion removes the bias of some teams playing more games than others by using an average of averages approach. This accounts for the fact that teams who have played more games will inflate the total number of points scored, which in turn will affect the overall average.

    So, let’s apply the average of averages method to the original question from the start of Pierik’s article: have the AFL’s rule changes worked?

    Using the latter approach, we can see that the average of each team’s points per game across the first three rounds of the season has increased from 91.86 last year to 93.40 this year – a year-on-year increase of just 1.67% (compared to the 5.22% increase seen in the former method). 

    The results from 2021 to 2023 are the same for both methods because the same number of games were played across the first three rounds. The somewhat contentious introduction of Opening Round in 2024 has meant teams have played an uneven number of games until later in the season. As a result, the average of averages method is more accurate.

    Inside 50s, which remained relatively consistent in Pierik’s analysis, do not change drastically using the average of averages method.

    It will be interesting to check in and see how scoring changes once teams play more games and are back on level footing with respect to games played. But in the meantime, it’s more accurate to say that the spike in early season scoring isn’t as large as everyone thinks it is.

    Tracking the Tracker

    Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois

    There’s been a lot of talk this week about the spate of hamstring injuries and whether this is due to the running loads taken on by teams. I wanted  to dive into the data that is available to us at a team level and see if we can corroborate some of what has been said.

    Firstly, this data is derived from the tracker found in the AFL App. It surfaces both team and individual data. Individual data however is only surfaced for the top five players for a given metric in any match. With that limitation it’s not really possible to get a proper season trend for any given player. They may run the same amount two weeks in a row, be captured in that top five one week, and be missing the next simply because five other players ran further.

    It’s also important to note that there are some games where there’s clearly been a GPS error so there are some weird outliers. I haven’t had the time to go through and weed them out unfortunately.

    The metrics we’ve got at our disposal are:

    • Total distance covered (metres)
    • Distance covered at high speed (18+ km/h) (metres)
    • Number of sprints (Occasions running above 24km/h for at least 1 second)
    • Number of repeat sprints (Total sprints within 60 seconds of each other)
    • Average speed of movement while team is in possession of the ball (m/s)
    • Average speed of movement while opposition is in possession of the ball (m/s)

    For a start we’ll look at the raw figures.

    open chart

    We can see that across our 6 metrics things have either plateaued or slightly decreased from last year.

    However, as Cody and Lincoln have each written about this week March football is not indicative of a full season. What happens if we restrict our focus and look at just games played in March?

    open chart

    We can see a modest increase. It’s not earth shattering, but if players are already loaded up to capacity every bit on top of that will have a greater impact.

    If the metrics change substantially during a season, what does that actually look like?

    open chart

    We can see that pretty consistently distance covered at high speeds starts slow and peaks mid-late season. Sprints over the past three seasons have also climbed from a low base. Other metrics have a more limited variation and it’s harder to determine a trend as opposed to just noise.

    Given we’re starting from a higher base it will be interesting to see if and where the high intensity metrics peak this season and what impact that has.

    It’s also worth considering what these metrics actually mean for winning and losing.

    open chart

    The eye test tells us that for most metrics there doesn’t appear to be much of a link. This is backed up by a quick spearman correlation coefficient. This isn’t too surprising, different game styles require different running loads so the lack of strong overall trends makes sense.

    The exceptions are teams that win tend to run slower on offense and faster on defense.

    If we look at team by team we might be able to find some more interesting features.

    open chart

    Since we’re going off a smaller population size (70 – 80 per team as opposed to 800 games across the entire league) we’d need to see stronger correlations to take note of them. This is admittedly pretty rudimentary analysis, but a ballpark figure would be that we should start to take notice at above 0.25 (or below -0.25, with negative values indicating a positive differential is correlated with losing).

    Sprint differentials for a number of teams start to climb into meaningful territory. Melbourne and Essendon also benefit from a high repeat sprint differential.

    Brisbane’s wins are correlated with distance covered (both high speed and total) more than other teams, while Collingwood are edging a meaningful correlation to total distance covered.

    A final thing we can look at is the profiles of individual teams quarter by quarter.

    open chart

    We should note that the running a team does is very dependent on the context of a game, but we can still note a few interesting observations (from a small sample size):

    • As you would expect, across most metrics most teams workload drops off during a game – players tire out and run less or run slower.
    • Fremantle’s speed on attack has risen through the game, as have Carlton and the Giants to lesser extents.
    • Port Adelaide’s speed with and without the ball falls off a cliff in the second half, Carlton’s speed on defence has cratered in the third term and recovered slightly in term 4 – but still is in stark contrast to their speed attacking.
    • A few teams have a secondary peak in Q3 after the long break, Adelaide and Sydney fairly pronounced in this for distance total and distance high speed.
    • Carlton have the reverse of the typical profile for repeat sprints – peaking in Q2 and Q4
    • Essendon and Port are done by Q4 and this is most evident in the sprint figures – averaging almost 10 fewer sprints than the next lowest team for the quarter.

    Setting Up The Board

    Joe Cordy / @JCordy37

    Thursday night’s Hawthorn vs Sydney clash was my first opportunity to attend a live game this season, but more importantly it was my five-month-old son’s first opportunity to attend a live men’s game ever. Sat up in the fourth tier just to the south-side of the punt road end, he let the full breadth and majesty of the MCG wash over him and listened patiently while I explained how both teams set up their structures on each line to best exploit their own strengths and their opponent’s weaknesses.

    The first step in a long journey

    I explained to him that aside from the sense of community, the energy of the crowd and the feeling of being part of something bigger than just yourself, one of the reasons I’ll always prefer attending games live is the ability to all 36 players at once and how they’ve been organised. 

    The Sydney Setup

    I never completely resign myself to losing before a game’s begun but when Sarah Black confirmed Heeney’s absence, meaning the Swans would play for the first time since the end of 2020 without him or Errol Gulden in the side, I lowered my expectations. When a player is removed from the top of the talent pyramid you don’t just wipe however many potential points off the scoreboard like a tower getting shorter; the effect cascades downwards throughout the playing group. “Who can fill their roles? Who can fill the roles of the people filling their roles? Who can fill the roles of the people filling the roles of the people filling their roles?” reverberating ad nauseum throughout the list.

    After a season that felt like building and repairing a plane while it’s in the air, Cox understandably opted for stability. Caiden Cleary and Corey Warner would come in to provide general forward presence and stoppage support, Justin McInerney would move closer inside the contest, but he wasn’t ready to shift other major pillars like Callum Mills on-ball from his defensive position. While nobody besides Brodie Grundy had attended more than 70% of CBAs throughout the first two games, this matchup saw a much tighter rotation of Rowbottom, Warner and McInerney all getting 70% each with nobody else attending more than a third.

    Knowing the deliveries wouldn’t be as clean or as frequent as they normally enjoy, the Swans forwards were spread in a way that tried to maximise their 1v1 capabilities. When setting up for a mid arc stoppage they’d typically form into a 1-2-1 wide diamond formation: a player one-out in the goal square (typically Curnow), a skinny side tall in the pocket ready to come in and overlap (typically McDonald), a fat side general forward playing a rest defence role to cut off the Hawks’ counter attack should they try to switch the play (typically Lloyd), and a final tall one kick out from the stoppage ready to wrestle under a floating dump kick (typically Amartey). 

    While this setup worked well for periods, its efficacy quickly waned as they were forced into long dump kicks that lacked the precision of Gulden, or ground-level follow up of Heeney. Many kicks came from long range and wide angles trying to find a target in the central corridor that Hawthorn quickly mopped up. 

    Sydney kicks inside 50 to a direct turnover via Emlyn Breese

    When Sydney were able to retain possession from these entries were the shorter, more controlled kicks from the corridor in instances where the talls could halve the aerial contests for players like Papley and Rosas Jnr to run onto. 

    Sydney kicks inside 50 to non-mark/free retention via Emlyn Breese

    While hindsight is 20/20 and most things are easier said than done, it seems clear now that what the Swans lacked was the composure to create more of these situations rather than bombing in hope. 

    The Hawthorn Setup

    Even with their undeniable scoring power, the Hawthorn forward line isn’t one that’s typically thought of as having an overwhelming amount of tall talent. Despite this they’re currently a top four team for marks inside 50, in both the total number and relative to the amount of entries they generate. 

    Their ability to maximise the output of their forwards, many of whom are still young or have been moved on by other clubs, comes from a system built on emphasising their individual strengths.

    Unlike Sydney’s diamond formation with their four forwards all ready to use their size and strength, Hawthorn choose to line up in something closer to a 1-3 T-shape for mid-arc stoppages. One isolated deep tall, and then a line of three others closer to the source with acres of space behind them. Unlike a lot of other sides, including their opponents on the night, that would have their tallest target as the one out the Hawks were at their best when Mabior Chol was further up the field and Jack Gunston running out of the goal square. The Hawks rely on footspeed and beating their opponents horizontally to create uncontested marks, and deployed like this they were able to create set shot opportunities from every angle. 

    Hawthorn kicks inside 50 to a mark/free via Emlyn Breese.

    Even though the winning goal came from a moment of brilliance with Gunston kicking across his body at a stoppage, they were a mirror image of the Swans – at their best when creating an uncongested forward line to take marks on the lead. Cox was eventually able to clog up some of this space by conceding an extra at stoppages to let Mills wander loose in defensive 50, but without their usual on-ball talent to cover this deficiency in manpower the Hawks were able to score on volume rather than quality of entries.

    This ability to spread and stretch their opponents across the entire width of the MCG is all about putting their players in positions to succeed. During his one year stay in Brisbane, Jack Gunston’s shots and goal tallies hit career lows alongside his marks on the lead; now he’s hitting career highs in what should be his twilight years. In fact, no Hawthorn player was in the top 20 for offensive 1v1 contests in 2025, but had two in the top 20 for marks inside 50 including Gunston leading the league.

    Controlling the Controllables

    It’s impossible to ever completely unpick exactly what parts of a team’s performance can be attributed to a coach’s tactical system, innate talent of the players or their skill execution on the day. 

    Sam Mitchell’s decision to move Barrass onto Curnow in the second half worked well not least of all because Tom Barrass is a brilliant player, but it was close to not having mattered because of a double swing in each team’s scoring against expectation.

    While footy pedants like myself love getting into long arguments distinguishing who is each club’s best player, who’s their most important, and whether or not they’re the same person, the only two possible answers to either of those questions for Sydney were both unavailable to Dean Cox. While it’s far from a guarantee the Swans would have flipped the result had they played, it’s impossible to imagine they wouldn’t have performed better. 

    Coaches though are in the business of controlling the controllables. Much to their dismay players aren’t chess pieces that will be reliably available performing identical functions week in week out, and so the best coaches are the ones who can identify what’s within the range of possibilities and adapt to what their players are offering them on the day.

    I don’t know if my boy fully understood any of this, but he seemed to enjoy himself all the same.

    Around the Grounds

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  • Round 2, 2026

    Round 2, 2026

    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.

    Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

    Before the Bounce

    Last weekend inexplicably saw the first full slate of games prior to gather round. Between opening round and the subsequent byes, the start of the season takes on a very disjointed feeling.

    You’d be forgiven for feeling similarly disoriented watching some of the football.

    Tom Lynch pulled off a herculean effort in denying Carlton a 0-2 start. Melbourne of all teams put forward some of the most electric ball movement we’ve seen, with Latrelle Pickett setting a new record for most bounces on debut.

    The 2-0 Swans received a massive blow with Errol Gulden out for months for surgery to repair a dislocated shoulder. While there were other personnel issues compounding things last year, the difference between Sydney with Errol and without was stark. The style of football being played right now seems tailor made for him. Ultimately though it seems a necessary call, it’s hard to see them going all the way in September without him so they’ll be hoping they can amass enough wins in the meantime to qualify for finals in good order.

    Justin Longmuir answered a direct question about opening round’s impact on fixture equity. His answer, while still utterly sensible, aged poorly over the following 24 hours as underdogs Melbourne and Adelaide overcame teams that played the week prior. Unfortunately the tune-up game advantage proved too much for the Eagles to overcome on their trip to Carrara.

    This Week in Football we have:

    For young and old

    Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois

    In Round 24 last year Melbourne fielded the most experienced and oldest side it had in 14 seasons. It became one of just 6 teams to go into the final game of the season unchanged while finishing 13th or lower.

    Last Sunday Steven King rolled out his new look Demons. Even with the additions of Brody Mihocek, Jack Steele, and Changkuoth Jiath it was the second least experienced Melbourne team since mid-2022 (2025 Round 1 was a touch fresher driven by five debutants).

    Many faces were new, but the biggest change was game style. Initially Simon Goodwin brought an innovative and attacking gameplan. By the premiership year of 2021 he had transitioned the team to a ruthless and effective focus on contest and defence (covered in my reflections on the Goodwin years here.)

    In the 121 games Melbourne have played since Round 1 2021, Sunday saw them record their 3rd fewest intercepts, their 6th fewest contested possessions, and their 5th fewest tackles.

    If we dive a bit deeper, Melbourne recorded their 5th lowest expected chain score from turnover. This represents what the average league team would be expected to score based on where they were able to generate intercepts. It was the basis of the old Melbourne gameplan. Keep generating turnovers in dangerous positions, and trusting sheer weight of opportunity to overcome the inefficiency that accompanied it.

    For most of the previous five years these numbers would represent an utterly miserable afternoon at the footy for demons fans. They would be lucky to score 40 points.

    Sunday was different. Very different. The ball use on display by Melbourne was electric. They had their 6th highest ball use equity (see Joe’s piece last week for a discussion on this metric), 11th highest post-clearance equity, and 3rd highest ball use equity per disposal.

    It was their 3rd highest xScore, 4th highest shots at goal, 5th highest rate of scoring from chains and 8th highest rate of scoring from the defensive half.

    Now, as the more observant Melbourne fans will tell you this wasn’t purely a Steven King initiative.

    Simon Goodwin had clearly moved to transition the gameplan to a more outside and attacking one in 2025 (arguably to a lesser extent in 2024 too). There was a critical mismatch between intended style and the players available though, and potentially too much baggage off-field to allow a full reset of the gameplan without a broader reset of personnel.

    On the St Kilda side, Sunday was the 5th most disposals Melbourne has allowed an opponent at the 6th highest disposal efficiency. St Kilda recorded the 9th lowest intercepts of Melbourne’s opponents, the 5th highest shots at goal, the 8th highest expected score, the third highest rate of scoring from chains and scoring from the defensive half. It was the 18th highest ball use per equity, but the 18th lowest turnover xChainScore.

    What does it all mean? The stats met the eye test. The ball ricocheted from end to end all day, more often than not ending in a scoring shot or an intercept possession under immediate pressure. The teams combined for 34 uncontested marks inside 50, the 3rd highest from 2017 onwards.

    JVR and Mihocek were targeted 11 and 9 times for eight marks and another two ground gathers by Mihoceck. Melbourne only kicked four times into 50 without an identifiable target, two of those resulting in a contested mark by Mihocek and a free to Sharp. St Kilda entered without a target eight times yielding three turnovers and no marks or frees. 

    There are clearly questions over how Melbourne will defend, but I don’t think the openness of Sunday’s game should be seen as a weakness. Melbourne were challenged numerous times, but were never challenged on tempo. St Kilda were happy to allow a shoot-out, Steven King didn’t seem eager to change things up. My best guess is he thought we were taking advantage of that type of game better than St Kilda.

    Lever’s credentials are impeccable, I highly rate Turner, and Petty has the opportunity to be a very good defender if we abandon the idea of making him a forward. A good smaller lockdown defender is still a bit of a question mark. I think the hope is Andy Moniz-Wakefield might fill that role when ready, and Bowey can do a decent job too (although you want to maximise his footskills).

    If the players and system can put a reasonable amount of pressure on opposition disposal (harder this year than ever), I think Melbourne has the players there to take on a more defensive approach when required.

    All of the above comes with a gigantic disclaimer: It’s one match, the opponents were bedding down a new team, and it was in near-perfect conditions. Who knows what happens next week against a more settled Fremantle, or when winter sets in.

    For all the Melbourne fans I’ve talked to though the result was never the main concern on Sunday. We wanted to see evidence of a coherent game plan. We wanted to see how Jacob van Rooyen would benefit from another legitimate tall forward to work with. We wanted to see moments from the likes of Latrelle Pickett.

    I was lucky enough to get my own moment. We took three generations to the footy on Sunday, my dad and I with my two kids. All day my youngest was asking when Max was going to kick a goal, but he was generally hanging behind play. At one point he was in good position before we immediately turned it over.

    We’d made it to three quarter time and the kids had reached their limit despite having fun. The fourth quarter had just started and the kids decided they wanted to head back up the steps to take one last look before we left.

    They had a look and were halfway down the steps again when I heard a roar. Max had taken a mark deep in the forward pocket. I called my youngest up and said she might want to take a look at this while trying my best to manage expectations (“it’s a pretty hard shot”, “he doesn’t always kick it”).

    I should never have doubted it, a beautiful drop punt split the middle. I asked her three days later what her favourite part of going to the footy was: “When Max kicked a goal for me”. Sometimes footy is incredible.

    Anchoring the Defence

    Joe Cordy / @JCordy37

    When Leicester City completed their fairy tale run to their first ever Premier League title, the rest of the football world immediately started picking their squad apart for pieces. While they’d make hundreds of millions of pounds from sales of players like Riyad Mahrez, Harry Maguire, Ben Chillwell, the player who brought in a lower transfer fee than any of them would also prove to be the most difficult to replace. After his move to Chelsea the defensive midfielder N’Golo Kante would go on to immediately win another Premier League with the blues, shortly thereafter a World Cup with France, and was immortalised by the meme phrase “70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, the rest is covered by N’Golo Kante.”

    What made Kante so valuable, and every team he played on so strong, was his unparalleled workrate making him akin to having two players on the pitch. Though he was limited in possession, he was the kind of elite defensive stalwart coaches dream about being able to rely on, even across codes of football.

    The Elites

    Similar to the rare air Kante existed in, there are only a handful of such players in the AFL. Of the 253 players classified as either key or general defenders by Champion Data, only 17 are rated “elite” (in the top 10%) by CD’s own Player Ratings system. Even of those 17 only a small handful gain that rating through a combination of defensive prowess and rebound attacking ability. 

    The first defining trait of these players is how their teams can rely on them as a one-man last line of defence. Even as team defensive 1v1s decrease year-on-year, with more and more leaning on cohesive support systems to avoid being caught out in individual duels, many contending teams have a single defensive general they can rely on to at least halve these contests and cover the ground necessary to support their teammates. 

    What sets the best of the best apart is in the next phase. Possession has been won, the threat neutralised, now it’s time to attack. Where Kante would make a simple pass here to a player whose skills more suited progressing the ball, some are more like an Aussie Andrea Pirlo in their passing range and accuracy. 

    Whether that be through direct, high risk and reward transitional footy…

    …or the safer approach built around maintaining possession.

    The two greatest proponents of this dichotomy are both in the new powerhouse region of the AFL, South-East Queensland. Gold Coast’s Sam Collins ability to unlock opposition’s high lines complimented the Suns’ attacking style that would often see his forward counterpart in Ben King isolated in F50, while Harris Andrews’ patience and precision made him the safest kick in football in 2025. 

    The Hole Left Behind

    The other edge of the blade for teams lucky enough to have one of these players is what life looks like trying to adapt without them. Due to both system familiarity and cap space as a resource, it can be a jarring adjustment to teams trying to recreate them in the aggregate either in the short term through injuries or suspensions, or in the long term as their skills inevitably wane. 

    Never was this clearer than in the Round One Sydney vs Brisbane clash when Brisbane went to the SCG with not just Harris Andrews missing, but also his second-in-command Darcy Gardiner (as well as McCluggage, Bailey and Morris through injury). While their replacements put in a strong effort, containing star recruit Charlie Curnow to zero goals from four shots, they were ultimately unable to cover the depth of the Swans’ tall stocks with Joel Amartey and Logan McDonald enjoying five and two goals respectively. More importantly though was their inability to successfully counter-attack when they did wrestle control back for periods in the third quarter. 

    An attack built on clean transition between the arcs was completely thwarted, going coast to coast at nearly half of their 2025 rate and turning just one of 46 rebound-50s into a score. Despite their clear dominance in the clearance battle, without the safety of their defensive anchor they were unable to penetrate the Swans’ rest defence and move the ball quickly in a league where it’s increasingly becoming the name of the game. 

    Two of their three recent Grand Final opponents are facing similar issues not through single-game absences, but a longer term decline and need to lift the burden from their one-time defensive talisman. Coming off of some of their career-best form in 2022 and 2023 respectively, form that played a major role in leading their sides to those year’s premierships, Tom Stewart and Darcy Moore are losing the inevitable battle to father time. While they’re still incredibly talented players who would comfortably fit into the best-23 of most, if not all, teams in the league, both of their systems-based coaches are tinkering to figure out what life looks like after they hang the boots up. 

    Chris Scott is having the much easier time of it, with the Geelong conveyor belt of talent delivering him new options like Sam De Koning and Connor O’Sullivan, but his former teammate Craig Macrae seems poised to split the defensive and attacking duties of the Collingwood captain as they push for a record-breaking 17th premiership. The Magpies move the ball now more through traditional rebounding half-back flankers such as Josh Daicos and last year’s recruit Dan Houston, while the defensive contest work is left to players like Moore and Frampton in the air and Maynard and Quaynor at ground level. 

    …and the Have-Nots

    This of course isn’t a particularly novel approach. Given there are significantly less of these Swiss army knife defenders than there are teams, the majority of coaches and list managers find ways to recruit specialised players and built systems to get the most out of them. Whether it’s Sydney using the bigger bodies of Melican and McCartin to wrestle opposition forwards while Blakey floats loose and finds the space to attack, or the Bulldogs’ use of their elite midfield line to press high and simply not allow the opposition a look at their significantly weaker defensive group, there are good teams who can put in strong seasons without having one of these Aussie Rules equivalents Kante or Pirlo.

    It is undeniably true however that when you review the lineups of recent premiers, they do consistently stand out. Between the likes of Andrews, Moore, Stewart, May and Lever, it may well be argued that the absence of these first-class bulwarks excludes a team from true premiership contention. 

    We’re losing sight of what makes footy awards fun

    Jack Turner / TheBackPocketAU.com / TheBackPocketAU

    Nick Daicos famously lost two awards last year that he was heavy favourite to win – The Brownlow Medal and the Copeland Trophy – and the surrounding footy world seemingly lost their minds about it.

    Craig McRae even confirmed in an interview as recently as last week that the Copeland Medal voting will be altered for “extreme games” as he put it. When queried he did not deny that it was specifically a Nick Daicos rule. None of this is Nick’s fault of course, and I want to acknowledge that at least before moving on. 

    Regardless of the number of accolades on his Wikipedia page (of which there are already many) being at worst the second or third best player in the league at just 23 years of age with less than 100 games under his belt – and having been for at least two seasons – is credit and reward enough in and of itself.

    The inner goings on at Collingwood – while disrespectful to very deserving winner Darcy Cameron – are none of my business as a general footy fan, but the fallout to the Brownlow Medal count certainly is.

    Craig McRae presenting the 2025 E.W Copeland Trophy to Nick Daicos Darcy Cameron

    It would be fair to say that for the past two seasons, Nick Daicos and Marcus Bontempelli have been the two best footballers in Australia without either taking home a Brownlow medal. It would not be fair to say that this is without precedent or that we need to make drastic change to the voting – but that is what AFL House have decided to do.

    At the end of last year – in maybe the first and last ever move made that doesn’t please the sports betting lobby – the AFL announced that they would allow the umpires to view certain stats before casting their votes in order to avoid wrong or missed votes.

    The only problem with this is not only the issue of “lies, lies and damned statistics,” – for starters, the umpires won’t have access to the Player Ratings system that the AFL specifically commissioned to be a stronger indicator of performance than available data – the idea that umpires can look at stats cheapens the Brownlow Medal significantly.

    We already have the AFLCA MVP, Players Association Award (and TWIF Player of the Year) and countless other media awards that typically go to the statistically-most-correct best footballer in the country, we don’t need football’s night of nights to blend into the melting pot of boring predictable awards.

    Part of what makes the Brownlow Medal so fun (and so profitable for the AFL and its many gambling partners) is the possibility of an upset. A player who might unexpectedly storm from the clouds. Some of the most iconic and memorable Brownlow nights have been upsets. Think Adam Cooney, Matt Priddis, Shane Woewoedin, etc.

    It’s also not as if a Brownlow Medal is a required legacy piece to cement you as an all time great. If Bontempelli and Daicos never win one, they’ll join the likes of Gary Ablett Snr, Luke Hodge, Leigh Matthews, Joel Selwood, Wayne Carey and Scott Pendlebury as some of the best to have ever played the game without winning the game’s biggest award.

    One of the biggest arguments in favour of this has somehow been how high second place (but only when it has been Nick Daicos) has polled, despite not winning the award. But this isn’t a freak event, second place – and even third place – have been trending higher the longer the AFL era has gone, as umpires tend to look for stars to give their votes to more often. On that note, now for some numbers.

    In 1990 the Brownlow Medal winner polled just 18 votes – an outlier for sure, but one that would be repeated just three years later in 1993. From 1990 to 1999 the top three players in the Brownlow Medal combined for an average of 64.2 votes. By 2009 the rolling 10 year average had grown to 67.5 votes, and by 2019 it had exploded to 83.2 votes. 

    The current rolling 10 year average excluding 2020 has grown again to 90.8. Even 2020 in its truncated form saw the top-three poll higher than sixteen of the twenty years from 1990- 2009.

    In the long and storied history of the Brownlow Medal, there are 327 players with more than 50 Brownlow Votes and zero wins, 70 with more than 100, 12 with more than 150 and somehow – remarkably – three with more than 200. Marcus Bontempelli joined Joel Selwood and Scott Pendlebury in the elusive 200 club last season.

    Of the players without a Brownlow Medal but who have polled 100+ career votes, Nick Daicos sits comfortably atop this list as the only player averaging better than a vote a game – just ahead of 1940s St Kilda centreman and World War II veteran Harold Bray. Bray also was runner up twice in his short career, but one can only hope and anticipate that Nick Daicos will have more than 120 career games to win his elusive Brownlow, and is less likely* to have the middle of his career interrupted by the biggest war in history.

    *less likely but by the current state of things unfortunately a non-zero chance

    Of the Brownlow-less footballers (not to be confused with Brownless footballers – shout out Billy and Oscar – or Brownlees footballers – shout out Tom – though they also don’t have any Brownlow Medals between them) with the best average votes per game over 150+ or 200+ eligible career games; Marcus Bontempelli tops both lists, just ahead of Joel Selwood and fellow current A-grade stars Christian Petracca, Max Gawn and Zach Merrett. 

    Daniel Kerr also a notable name on this list considering how much lower players polled when he was at his peak, and that he was having votes stolen from him by Cousins, Judd, Cox and even Embley and Fletcher.

    So we can’t take back this year – in which there is equal chance the AFL gets what they want and Nick Daicos wins, or even Marcus Bontempelli, or that we see it awarded to a player padding stats off the wing or half back – but for future years; Greg Swann, Andrew Dillon and the entire AFL Commission – yes even Matt De Boer – consider this article a plea to revert this cynical and beige change to the voting.

    The unpredictability of the Brownlow Medal is what makes the night so special. What use will our Bingo sheets be if there is no chance a player will get 3 Votes for a 9 disposal game. What of the roughie inside midfielder at a club with a good record or series of close losses (shoutout to Patrick Cripps, Matt Rowell and Ollie Wines, and apologies once again to Marcus Bontempelli) who you tell your friends is a chance and then get to gloat about on Tuesday morning?

    The umpires – despite making the odd mistake every now and then – are best placed to see who the most impactful player on the field is even without their statistics. Despite the “upset” victories in high-polling recent seasons, the winner has been top five in the AFLCA award in all bar one year, and that was Patrick Cripps in 2022; perhaps considered to be the least surprising of the lot, and definitely the more expected of his two brownlow wins.

    I say this as one of the nerds who obsesses over football numbers in places like this newsletter, and the back rooms of football clubs and tv studios: don’t take away the one little part of our beautiful game that has not yet been ruined by over-analysis and boring numbers.

    Inside inside 50s

    Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois

    I’ve been working on something I think is pretty cool – a new way to visualise inside 50s.

    You can see the beta version of that at https://charting.football/i50/ loaded up with the data from 2026.

    Disclaimer: While the code to interpret the data was written by me using R, I’ve used Claude to assist with building the visualiser in Javascript.

    In pulling it together I’ve got a bunch of underlying data on inside 50s so here’s a few early observations.

    Tim Membrey has the highest mark or free kick rate of any player targeted in the f50 10+ times, while teammate Jack Buller has not yet registered a mark from 13 targets.


    A quick look at the other end with the kickers. Ed Richards clearly on top with his kicks ending in a mark or free kick 47% of the time.

    I’ll come back to this as the season develops, but in the meantime if you’ve got feedback on the visualiser the easiest place to contact me is on twitter.

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