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
This season, for all its apparent evenness, has ended up strangely bifurcated between the two halvs of the ladder. Three wins and percentage separate 9th and 10th, and while there’s about a 1 in 20 chance of 10th bridging that gap with a mad win streak and two other teams collapsing, for all practical purposes the race is now down to half a dozen teams trying not to be the one team that misses out when the season is done.
This has triggered a lot of talk of the season being too long, and a lot of opportunistic discussion of ideas to make the long winter stretch more interesting, but it’s worth remembering that:
- The race for 9 teams into 8 spots is still pretty fun and exciting
- One of the reasons the ladder is the way it is is the parity between most of the top 8, and as a result the premiership race looks very open
- The other main reason for the gap is the teams sitting 10th to about 14th have won less games than they usually do.
With fewer expectations on Essendon and St Kilda this season, we can probably name the Swans, Port, Carlton and Demons as the four sides who are, for different reasons, further adrift than most would’ve expected early in the year. That’s a whole chasing pack who, most other years, would be jostling for finals right up until the last couple of rounds.
It’s a weird season, but at least the flag race looks pretty open.
This week in football we have:
That’s ruck craft, big boy
Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com
I’ve always liked rucks.
I’m a firm believer that one of the best things a team can do for its marketability is having a really tall guy who stands out in looks and play. My kids are currently Max Gawn supporters first and Melbourne supporters second.
As a Melbourne supporter approaching 40 I feel like I’ve seen my fair share of good rucks and then some. Of the 34 All Australian teams named since 1991, Melbourne has provided the first choice ruck eight times, plus another 3 inclusions on the interchange bench (Gawn 5+2, Jamar 0+1, White 1, Stynes 2).
While we’ve had stats on hit outs and hit outs to advantage for a while, there’s a lack of understanding of how much these impact the game. Let’s look at the potential outcomes of a ruck contest and see where the most value for a team is.
As you’d expect, getting a free from the ruck contest is by far the best outcome, followed by hit outs to advantage. Ruck hard ball gets also put you in a good position.
If we look at hitouts overall though, even when including hit outs to advantage as part of that, they barely move the needle. A quarter of them don’t lead to a clearance at all, and teams are almost as likely to concede a clearance or scoring opportunity after winning a hitout as they are to generate one.
Another consideration is that two Ruck Hard Ball Gets aren’t necessarily the same. Let’s break down some of these outcomes by the top 20 rucks (by hitouts recorded in 2025).
(Selecting one of the flows will highlight that flow across all charts, allowing for easier comparison)
In terms of getting the ball moving, Oscar McInerney and Brodie Grundy are kings – 85% and 80% of their RHBGs resulting in a clearance for their team. For the next step along, Luke Jackson generates a scoring chance from 44% of RHBGs, well ahead of the next best in Gawn and English, both sitting at 30%.
43% of Kieran Briggs’ RHBGs end up with a clearance going the wrong way, while Sean Darcy is a rock – 25% of his result in the ball not clearing the stoppage area.
Turning to Hitouts To Advantage, Jarrod Witts leads the league in seeing HTA turn to clearances with 83% ahead of Darcy Fort and Matt Flynn on 80%. 30% of Jordon Sweet’s HTAs result in a scoring chance, but he also has the highest number of HTAs turn into an opponent scoring chance at 9.2%. This highlights that these figures can be heavily influenced by the supporting midfielders. Port are electric when they’re on, but can lack some defensive accountability with the league’s worst opposition score from stoppages.
Now that we know what they’re worth, let’s look at how good teams are at generating them. There are some limitations on the data I have – one being that I don’t know who the opposing two rucks are – only the ones that record a stat (Ruck hard ball get, hit out, getting or conceding a ruck free). Because of that we have to look at these stats team-wide rather than individually.
Melbourne, North Melbourne, Sydney, and Carlton are the best at generating positive outcomes – each getting a Ruck Hard Ball Get or better from at least 18.4% of their ruck contests compared to an AFL average of 15.4%.
Looking at the other end, West Coast, Essendon, St Kilda, and the Giants all give up good starting position relatively regularly. Looking at the differentials (% of contests gaining Ruck Hard Ball Get or better minus % of contests conceding the same), Melbourne and North Melbourne are clearly in front at +6%.
Now, ruck frees aren’t that common, occurring about one in every 36 contests. However, they are impactful – as we discovered earlier 20% of them lead to a scoring chance – so they do warrant a further look.
Since 2021 the best players at generating more ruck frees than they give away are Ben McEvoy and Sam Hayes. In the opposite direction, Stefan Martin is the only player to break the -1 free per hundred contests barrier.
For a bit of fun let’s wind up with the head to head ruck free kick counts for the 15 rucks with the most hitouts since 2025.
The thing that jumps out to me here is just how hard Jarrod Witts is to ruck against. A lot of ruck frees seem to come when an experienced ruckman is up against a pinch hitter. Witts is posting big numbers against the elite rucks of the competition with only Darcy Cameron (5-1) and Oscar McInerney (2-1) getting the better of him.Finally, numbers can only tell us so much. I highly recommend Jeff White’s youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@First_Use/videos). It contains a lot of video analysis, but with a particular focus on ruck contests and stoppage play.
The mostly-one sided nature of common matchups
Many of you will know that Carlton and Collingwood have played against each other more than any other combination of teams in V/AFL history, with last Friday’s match being the 268th time the two teams have met.
Many of you may also know that this has historically been a very even rivalry, with the head-to-head ledger currently sitting at 135 wins for the Magpies, 129 wins for the Blues, and four draws.
But how even has the rivalry been over its 120-plus year history? Let’s graph the head-to-head record over time and find out. A quick look at the figure below tells us that there have been a few different periods of dominance by either club.
Collingwood had Carlton’s number more often than not for the best part of the first century of the rivalry, then it was Carlton’s turn to be on top from the mid 1970’s through to the early 2000s. From that point on the pendulum has swung back Collingwood’s way – and may continue to for some time given how disappointing Carlton have been since the turn of the century. But for the most part, the Carlton-Collingwood rivalry has had some degree of evenness, with neither club being more than 15 wins ahead of the other.
The second most common matchup in V/AFL history – Carlton versus Essendon – is slightly more one sided. Carlton also started this rivalry poorly, winning just seven of their first 25 games against the Bombers between 1897 and 1906. However, things have been in Carlton’s favour more often than not from that point onwards. The Blues won 19 of the 20 clashes between 1927 and 1939 and 17 out of 20 between 1968 and 1977, with the latter period of dominance resulting in a +21 count on the head-to-head record. However, Essendon have pulled things back since then to sit 10 wins behind the men from Princes Park on the all-time tally.
Collingwood versus Essendon, the third most common matchup, is even more one sided than the previous two. The Magpies currently have won 30 more games between these two teams than Essendon, and have not been behind in the head-to-head count since 1897. Diehard Pies fans will remember the 1990 team breaking a three-game losing streak against the Bombers in the 1990 semi-final, and getting the better of Essendon again just two weeks later in the Grand Final, the most-recent post-season encounter between the two sides.
In more good news for the black and white army, Collingwood also has the upper hand on their rivalry with Melbourne, leading the head-to-head by 72 games (157-85, with five draws). The Demons won the first and fourth games between the two clubs, but from that point on it has been advantage Collingwood. Although, to give Melbourne some credit, there have been two seven-game winning streaks against Collingwood since then, from 1939-1941 and from 1955-1957. This latter streak involved the Demons beating the Pies in two grand finals – 1955 and 1957.
And it’s a similar story for the fifth most common matchup – Collingwood and Geelong. Collingwood struggled early against Geelong, winning four of the first 13 games. A win over Geelong in the 1901 finals series set the Magpies on a 14-game win streak against their feline foes, which tilted the ledger in Collingwood’s favour. But I imagine Collingwood’s good record against Geelong will be of little comfort should the two teams meet again in September, with the Cats winning six of the last eight against the Magpies – including the last two finals (2020 semi-final and 2022 qualifying final).
Please stop calling things you don’t like “American”
Sean Lawson
Look, I get it. Nobody much likes the US these days.
Everyone’s favourite hegemonic state and nascent autocracy is sliding into a dark place, and we just had an election decided largely by voters rejecting its political and social trends.
So the temptation to dismiss something we don’t like as being American is substantial.
But this rhetorical flourish can go too far. In a sporting discourse landscape as replete as ours is with thought bubbles and reform plans, it seems like every week there’s some new innovation being put forth by some talking head. And there’s a common refrain dismissing these ideas as being “American”, a denigration intended to fully invalidate an idea on those grounds alone.
The behaviour is common on social media but also gets a guernsey in some more professional punditry. For example:
- Paul Roos saying of the idea of a cup competition “I just don’t understand Australian sports administrators’ fixation with American sport”.
- Michaelangelo Rucci describing free agency as “a labour right from American professional sport”
- Rohan Connolly on the “wildcard”: “Not that history means much to the sorts of vested interests who continually try to cram this Americanised garbage (designed for competitions with conferences, not one ladder) down our throats.”
Less temperate voices can also be found across social media, dismissing pretty much any idea around as smacking of yankeedom. From shorter game time to removing the father/son rule to private ownership, everything we don’t like is American to someone.
It’s not all America
I am not here to argue that American things are not bad. They very often are!
But I do think that, ironically, many of these criticisms are guilty of giving the US too much credit and centrality on the world stage, assigning certain ideas as exclusively American, when they have a broader currency around world sport or even within Australia.
Most obviously, the idea of an in-season cup competition, it scarcely needs be said, is most associated with the decidedly un-American sport of soccer.
Indeed, the NBA in-season tournament was a recent innovation created pretty much with the same reasoning the AFL is following – that if we can replicate soccer’s ability to run two competitions in parallel, we get more watchable content and more happy fans, and more money making opportunities.
America ain’t free
Then there’s player free agency. That’s is a particularly funny one to describe as “American” because United States professional sport probably has, on average, the least free player movement of any prominent country’s sporting landscape. Heavy with drafts and player trading, none of the four big leagues have the sort of total and full free agency common especially to soccer in many countries. American “free agency” refers instead to an unusually proscribed and specific set of circumstances.
Even in Australia, most of our major sports are characterised by pretty much total free agency, the full expression of a player’s unfettered right to work for who they wish.
In Australian sport, the most common practice is that, give or take some domestic player quotas or a salary cap, players in most leagues can pretty much sign with whoever they want whenever they are out of contract. That applies to the NRL, to the A-Leagues, to both rugby codes, to cricket, to netball, to basketball.
Indeed, the more AFL free agency expands, the more like other Australian sport it will become. At the moment, the strong influence of the national draft ironically does make it a more Americanised league than many others in this country. I’ve seen NRL fans dismiss the idea of a player draft on the grounds of it being a hated American innovation.
Wildcards
Finally, there’s the “wildcard” finals idea. As proposed, admittedly the American links are being created by overt misuse of the term by proponents.
In an AFL finals context the “wildcard” is simply describing adding a 9th and 10th team and a 5th week to finals, with 7 to 10 on the ladder spending the first week playing for survival.
That’s pretty much exactly the way the traditional McIntyre top 6 starts for teams who finish 3 through 6.
The concept of a staggered and asymmetrical finals series with lower teams having to play more weeks and win more games is definitely not an American innovation. Instead, it’s a long-standing Australian one. Our finals systems from the top 4 to the top 8 have all been replete with double chances and bye privileges for higher ranked teams. By contrast, American playoffs often plump for a straight knockout bracket where finishing with the first seed is barely an advantage.
Even the idea of finals involving many teams have their precedents. As noted last week, in 1898 the finals series used in the VFL involved all eight participating teams, resulting in the scenario in 1900 where Melbourne won the premiership from 6th. A number of footy leagues around the country have long run finals systems featuring over half the sides. The SANFL went decades qualifying 5 of 9 teams, the AFL in 1994 had 8 of 15.
To be clear, many ideas for new innovations are bad. The in-season tournament proposal, two-part seasons (so called “17-5” or similar breakdowns) where the last few rounds are re-seeded and bottom sides play for a draft pick, permanent conferences to even the ladder out. These things sound terrible! But they’re not terrible because they’re American, and they’re often not even really especially American.
Meanwhile there significant aspects of our sport which are exactly aligned with practice in the US, things which most fans approve of. These include the draft and salary cap, and a closed league without promotion and relegation. Nobody is advocating to ditch them these features for this reason.
In the end, the “American” label as a dismissal of novelty is cheap and easy, but it’s often hypocritical, it’s not persuasive and usually not even particularly accurate.
The long and short of it
Cody Atkinson, freeloader
Around this time of the year attention starts to turn to the ancillary awards of the elite competition. No – we aren’t talking about the upcoming AFL In-Season Non-Premiership Cup.
Instead, TWIF is talking about All-Australians, MVPs, Brownlows, Coaches’ Awards, BnFs…and the big two of them all.
That’s right – Mark of the Year and Goal of the Year.
hover over each blue and yellow bar to see each Mark of the Year
While the former usually delivers an absolute banger of a grab, the latter often leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a lot of this type of goal in the mix.
That’s no slight to Matt White – it’s a great run, and a good goal. But does it stick out? Colour us doubtful.
But what if we went another way to work out the Goal of the Year? This week TWIF has decided to look at the extremes – and the extremely average – to see if it would uncover a more spectacular goal that the normal goal of the year.
The season’s not over yet, but these are some out of the box contenders. None have been named as Goal of the Week this year.
Longest Goal of the Year
Everyone loves a roost right? You’re not going to find many better than this ping from Dan McStay last week to put the game well beyond doubt against Carlton.
Maybe it should have been rushed through for a behind. But who cares – he’s kicked it nearly 67 metres through the big sticks. There’s a couple of others that are close but this is the best of the long bunch.
Most average Goal of the Year
So far this year the average distance for a goal is about 31.6m. So surely picking the most average distance for a goal would produce the most average goal?
Or maybe not.
Shaun Mannagh’s sealer against Hawthorn put a cap on what was a pretty good game between two likely finalists. It’s far from the average goal, with limited time to operate and frenetic movement opening up the opportunity.
It should be noted that there are four other goals from the most average distance, but this was the first one chosen at random. Apologies to Nick Daicos, Tim Membrey, Rhyan Mansell and Jack Higgins for their equally average efforts.
Shortest Goal of the Year
You might question how you can find the truly shortest goal, and TWIF might agree with you to a large degree. But according to AFL data, this is the shortest one to the centre of goal this year.
After a look at the footage, it’s hard to disagree.
This was Jasper Alger’s first AFL goal. Every goal he kicks from here will likely be both less difficult and kicked from further away.
He barely gets a foot on the ball. The kick goes maybe three metres. Just 10cm or so of that journey is in the field of play.
It is glorious.
So maybe we should look at the extremes when looking for the best goal of the year.
Around the Grounds
- Jason Lassey at Footy Industry talks some sense about the (women’s) footy industry.
- Marnie Vinell and Broden Kelly also have a meaningful conversation on The Footy about the AFLW financial report as well.
- Did you know that you can check the approximate expected scores of a game live via social media and lose your mind about just how over or under par a team is shooting?
- Ricky Mangidis at Shinboner this week broke down Adelaide’s dominant aerial game (which has implications for September), and changes Essendon made after the bye, (which does not).
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