Little Goffy

Alas, numbers go up.

And all that pain right before the 'franchise' teams came in and blew a hole in any further rebuilding efforts. I take some comfort that we weren't the only club to stink up that draft. It is hilarious that after four picks in the first round, we gained a heritage-grade champion with pick 34. Also kind of funny that with Gawn and Melksham (who we originally hoped to get at 11) we have two of the six players still playing from that draft. Fremantle can relate to that - taking injury-cruelled Morabito at 4 but then getting exactly the player that they hoped Morabito would become at pick 20. Port Adelaide managed Butcher, Moore and Pittard at 8,9 and 16. Ouch. But when I look back at that draft era I can't help but feel a smirking pity for Carlton, whose drafting pain was spread in small doses year after year and prevented them from assembling a full team around what should have been an incredible champion core. Pretty much from the moment they traded Kennedy and pick 3 for Judd, it all went wrong. 2008 - Pick 6, Chris Yarran 2009 - Pick 12, Kane Lucas 2010 - (compromised draft) Pick 18, Matthew Watson 2011 - (Compromised draft) pick 22, Josh Bootsma 2012 - Pick 11, Troy Menzel 2013 - Pick 13, Patrick Cripps 2014 - Pick 19, Blaine Boekhurst 2015 - Finally a jackpot, with Weitering, McKay and Curnow 2016 - Pick 6, Sam Petrevski-Seton 2017 - Pick 3, Paddy Dow & Pick 10, Lachie O'Brien (Special mention to De Koning at 30) Ten drafts, a total of 13 first round picks, just 4 of them have been successful at AFL level, with three of those from a single draft. Honestly, their drafting hasn't improved much since. Finally got a swell of okay kids in the last couple of seasons and the difference shows, but no doubt a decade of very weak drafting is a significant reason behind the Blues never quite becoming a top threat despite having several absolutely first-rate champions.

Might as well say 'and other clubs can access free agency' or 'other clubs have trades'. Sydney has exactly the same access to f/s selections as every other club. Tom Mitchell was one of their best when they [] the bed against the Bulldogs in 2016. In addition to that they have been able to recruit, using disposable late picks; Braeden Campbell (2020), Errol Gulden (2020), Nick Blakey (2018), Callum Mills (2015), Isaac Heeney (2014) 2024 Swans best and fairest 1. Heeney, 2 Gulden, 5, Blakey, 2023 Swans best and fairest 1. Gulden, 2 Blakey, 8 Mills 2022 Swans Best and fairest 1. Mills, 5 Heeney, 7 Gulden Without the academy free kicks Sydney would have spent the last eight or so years being competitive but not a serious threat. Certainly their last grand final appearance would have been 2016, and even that season got a major boost from the fast-starting Heeney and Mills.

His win rate is less than 1 game per season better than Goodwin and for finals they are equal. Goodwin has only ever coached one finals blow-out, in his first ever finals campaign with a young team with barely a player who had finals experience. Longmire has literally never coached a team with less finals experience than the Demon's have now! Anyway, Longmire is a very good coach who fell short of greatness despite everything in his favour. I'm really just throwing down the gauntlet to any of the Goodwin-hating numbnuts out there who also want to pump Longmire's tyres.

Oh to be a club that doesn't leak. This has probably been a conversation with Dean Cox for a couple of months. You can guarantee Cox would have been having significant input into trade and draft conversations with this transition in mind. I have mixed feelings about Longmire's legacy. Zero doubt he is a very good coach, but I cringe when people describe him as great or one of the best. In the end, with a lot of favours going his way (coaching a club in solid form with ideal facilities and established culture, significant home ground advantage, which had already played finals almost continuously for 15 years, and which wasn't subject to the 'natural cycle' thanks to academy pick top-ups) his coaching record is roughly on par with Simon Goodwin.

For Shame! For Shame! May all your elevator rides be shared with Stewart Dew in a bad mood. Personally I thought the answer was going to be something to do with either profession outside football or some kind of animal mascot connected to the name. Ooh - in all cases there's a different common way to spell at lease one of their names?

Season ending podcast sounds like a nasty injury. "Yeah, obviously we're all very disappointed after it seemed like such an innocuous incident at the time, but he overextended his wit and it really blew up on monday so we're taking a precautionary approach. We're hoping that with a sustained program of social rehabilitation we'll have him back on simple conversations in about four to six weeks, and then begin working on his banter in time for round 1."

Only 6 from NSW, with one from Queanbeyan and one each from Moama from Albury, is an absolute stinker of a result too. Between that and the 4 from Queensland it means the AFL recruited just 7 players from above the Barassi line. That's $200m well spent. Also wondering if there might be a few Tassie kids who crossed to Victoria for exposure in their final pre-draft season to boost exposure, and that might mask their origins?

Saying he 'could do with a stern talking to' is hardly whipping him to death, though, is it? I love Fritsch and he is easily my wife's favourite player, but he had a very poor 2024 - particularly in the second half of the year - and the general problems in the team made his limitations very visible. He was down on every stat by about 20% and normally you'd hope that someone going through a slump would look to get back to basics and do the team things (and the other cliches) to work their way through it, but he couldn't manage it. He really looked like he had no preseason and a permanent head cold all season. Fingers crossed we get premium Fritsch back for 2025, because off his own boot and as a creative presence it would make a goal a game difference compared to 2024.

Chandler probably the lead candidate as he has the work rate and the role would help smooth his uneven performance. Sparrow might work and, like Chandler, the role would help keep him involved usefully at the times he isn't gathering the ball so much, but that would need some adjustments to his body (less crash, more dash) which might be counter-productive if we have him penciled in as a long term heavy body in the packs. Tholstrup has a real chance of developing into a potent weapon (I keep thinking a taller Paul Chapman) but in the contemporary game the starting point for a good mid-sized forward is harassment and pursuit. That'll take continuing fitness over multiple pre-seasons, but overall I can certainly see him contributing to our forward harrassment and even being a defensive forward when the need arises, though not in the Nibbler sense of all-day responsibility. Spargo knows how to be in positions which stop the ball from coming near him. A statistic-destroying skill but a valuable contribution, especially when he can also be so smart on the occasions he does get the ball. However, everything is at best 'monitor' with Spargo until he gets a clean injury run and finds some confidence. A collection of players (Bowey, Woewodin, Howes, Sharp, Brown, Hore) who aren't firmly wedded to a current position or even firmly in the 22 might each be given time to prove their team-first mettle across half-forward and that may turn up a nugget, but all have reasons to doubt, as well. Of course, I'm also 100% in favour of a whole-team ethic on these things. One of the reasons I have so much respect for TMac is he always delivered the pressure acts, and it is also a solid part of Van Rooyen's game. Fritsch could do with a stern talking to on this. Water finds the hole.

It is going to be weird watching our first pick (natural 36) go up and down wildly as academy bids add one selection to the early draft and then the picks being cashed in for points take other selections away. We could move as high as 40 and then back down to 30 in the space of an hour.

Wait and watch for the 2029 rule change that allows all impact injury payments to be completed outside the cap.

This ought to get Demonstone's juices flowing. Maybe a team entirely of players who have written for The Age?

These AI prompt image generators are getting scarily accurate. Feel like this is a strange selection but clearly we're on a years-long mission to find some forward mongrel to complement tough-but-smooth Van Rooyen and a couple of the lighter bodies we have coming through. Turner, Kentfield, Johnson and Sestan, hmm, I feel like we should be grabbing Cameron Mooney as a specialist 'forwards who know they aren't the best in the team but who will make sure you know they're playing' coach.

Well now that's got good omens written all over it.

Social maths is never so simple. Indigenous people are a much higher share of the 'Australian football' population. Even in the formal kids program, Auskick, 6.5% of the kids noted on their registration that they were Indigenous. So we're already looking at an expected five or so draftees per season and 50+ players on lists before you even begin looking at the disparity of participation in informal play or the effects of whole community relationships to Australian football. The Rioli family is not a statistically significant share of the Australian population! Given the timelines the article discusses, if there's a question to be answered it is simply "Has there been a negative shift in Indigenous participation in elite pathways since the Covid period?" If the previous connections were thinned out during the disruptions, such as culturally specific programs being cut during Covid and not yet restored, or community coaching programs in general haven't kept pace with the private school programs, then that would explain the current mild decline and would also point to a risk of continuing problems.

Lots of people will be pretty pleased with how that worked out. I suspect most disappointment will be with St Kilda's Battle compensation taking Alix Tauru from us. I'm going to hope that it works out a bit like getting Van Rooyen after missing out on Mac Andrew.

I've been struggling to find an analogy. Lindsay was easy because something twigged in me that said 'Kade Simpson', but Langford I can't quite pin a comparison. Earlier in the thread a couple of people noted an Angus Brayshaw look at times, and that caught my attention as well, particularly with a few occasions he ran hard back with the flight of the ball to take a defensive mark on the wing. Langford does look like a very 'complete' footballer, in a way that got me so excited about Gus back in his draft and early days. I remember thinking about how Petracca was 'one day' going to be a player who ripped games open, but that I still preferred Brayshaw for that feeling of completeness.

Possible that we have transformed our play around the ground in two drafts; Windsor, Tholstrup, Langford and Lindsay. Really looking forward to seeing them have a bit of fun while still shielded a bit by the powerful bodies of Viney, Trac and Oliver.

Now that Smith is off the board, I want to be clear that he is very annoying and will probably plateau early into the top end of 'good ordinary'.

Raising an eyebrow to later in the draft, it has been interesting seeing just how far Luke Trainor has slipped due to concussion. From a high of being routinely projected in the top-5, here's the range of picks he is placed at the main phantom drafts going around; 28; Cal Twomey's AFL.com 28; ESPN >27; Foxsports 20-40; Also Foxsports 18; SEN 22; RookieMe Central Concussion gives us all the skin-crawling sweats for obvious and sensible reasons, but surely a slide into the late 20s would start making us consider trading up to grab a potential jackpot in the key defender succession plan. We wouldn't need him on the field immediately so the scope for a cautious and thorough management plan would be there, he'd have great mentors, and we might be the no.1 club for responsible concussion management at the moment. Just a couple of months ago he was considered the outright best tall in the draft.

It is clearly a significant dip, but we don't want to get into a situation like when some [censored] 'artist-activist' made their attention seeking protest piece about how Geelong was the only club which didn't have an indigenous player in it's AFL team, when Geelong had spent the previous 20 years above average for indigenous presence. I have to give a hat-tip to @DeeSpencer for his list of plausible causes. In simplest terms - AFL elite pathways are becoming more narrowed and favouring privileged children. Indigenous children are less likely to be privileged. This kind of thing which isn't necessarily racist but does 'perpetuate a racist legacy' is exactly what critical race theory was originally about before the look-at-moi bloggers on the periphery of academia took over and ruined it. Reminds me of an old observation; If in 1980 you had waved a magic wand and eliminated racism, Australia would have been overall an equal enough society for a lot of the disadvantages to be absorbed with time and a new era to begin. But if today you waved that wand Indigenous people would still be stuck because Australia as a whole is now much more stratified and exclusive. I do wonder, how many 'poor' kids in general are making it into the AFL now? 25 of the projected top-30 picks this year are private school kids.

This must be how quantum physicists feel, waiting for their wavefunction to collapse. I think I'll go with three preferences for each pick, since the availability is so unpredictable. 5. Langford, Draper, Smith 9. Tauru, Lindsay, Smillie. I also suspect something interesting might happen with our late pick. Maybe even a trade-up into the 30s for a slider JT believes in.

I honestly can't imagine a scenario where a club that took a Curtain last year passes on a Draper this year.

His nickname may have to be Mouldy given how many people he's been growing on lately.