Jason Blake and Colm Begley of St KIlda collide with Grant Birchall of Hawthorn during the AFL Round 19 match between the Hawthorn Hawks and the St Kilda Saints at Aurora Stadium. Slattery Images
So your AFL club picked up Joe Bloggs, John Smith and Joey Joey Junior in this year’s National, Pre-Season and Rookie drafts. What do you make of it? It is hard to know.
Indeed, with Tuesday’s Pre-Season and Rookie drafts finalizing AFL lists, fans garner a sense of anticipation about seeing these youngsters in action next season, but it also makes supporters feel a tad vague about these unfamiliar names and faces.
Sure, nowadays it seems the top five or so National Draft selections generally turn out to be superstars, but beyond that it can be anyone’s guess.
So rather than pretend I know a lot about these teenagers, I thought about another way of making sense of it all.
And that direction would be researching every club’s recent recruitment and their rates of success and failure since the 2000 National Draft.
In turn, if I can discover a trend or two, perhaps we can brace ourselves for which clubs are about to strike gold in 2010.
The goal was to discover which clubs had failed with top 25 draft picks and which clubs had found hidden gems with late selections beyond the second round.
The criteria for a success or a failure was rather informal and based on whether or not a player had built a career for themselves as what I deemed a ‘good’ AFL footballer.
Some clubs who had an alarming number of early selection failures since 2000 included Richmond, Hawthorn, Collingwood and the Western Bulldogs as well as Adelaide, Fremantle and North Melbourne, while St Kilda, Geelong, Essendon and Brisbane had exemplary recent records.
While the Crows in particular, as well as Collingwood, West Coast and Geelong were regularly discovering hidden gems with late picks or rookie elevations.
Richmond is a club with a recent history of poor early selections, including picks such as Alex Gilmour (21 in 2003), Danny Meyer, Adam Pattison (12 & 16 in 2004) and Jarrad Oakley-Nicholls (8 in 2005).
But the Tigers had an early selection this year and that surely suggests they’ll get another Trent Cotchin, although they said the same thing about Richard Tambling (who I must admit did improve in 2009).
Interestingly, 2008 premiers Hawthorn have a rather hit-and-miss first-round record since 2000.
Of course, the Hawks focused on youth early in the decade, so high draft picks were frequent but many were wasted suggesting there’s a chance they may not be onto a good thing in 2009’s National Draft.
Nick Ries (21 in 2000), Richard Elstone (20 in 2001), Luke Brennan (8 in 2002), Beau Dowler, Max Bailey (6 & 18 in 2005) and Mitch Thorp (6 in 2006) are a few, although they added Luke Hodge, Lance Franklin and Sam Mitchell during that period too.
The Western Bulldogs are a curious example, with several inglorious high picks such as Tim Walsh, Cameron Faulkner (4 & 17 in 2002), Tom Williams, Jesse Wells (6 & 22 in 2004) and Jarrad Grant (5 in 2007) coupled by a few hidden gems with Brian Lake (71 in 2001), Daniel Cross (56 in 2000) and Josh Hill (61 in 2006).
Collingwood, too, haven’t drafted well with high picks in the past including Richard Cole (11 in 2001), Bo Nixon (21 in 2002), Billy Morrison (17 in 2003) and Chris Egan (10 in 2004).
But since Derek Hine’s arrival as the Magpies recruiting manager in 2005, things have taken a turn for the better with the recent acquisition of Dale Thomas, Scot Pendlebury, Nathan Brown, Steele Sidebottom and Dayne Beams.
Adelaide are an example of a club with a strange, inverted, recent history of drafting, with several high picks failing to make the grade including Lawrence Angwin (7 in 2000), Fergus Watts (14 in 2003), John Meesen (8 in 2004) and Darren Pfeiffer (17 in 2005).
Yet somehow the Crows seem to be the masters of the hidden gem. Graham Johncock (67 in 2000), Rob Shirley (56 in 2002), Nathan Bock, Ben Rutten (both Rookie Listed in 2002) Ben Hudson (58 in 2003), Jason Porplyzia (9 in 2005 Pre-Season Draft) and David Mackay (48 in 2006) are all good examples.
Indeed, recruitment is one thing, but nurturing talent and capitalizing on potential is another.
And no clearer could that point be represented in the fact that both of the 2009 Grand Finalists, Geelong and St Kilda, had outstanding recent success rates with top 25 picks since 2000.
But ultimately the success of a draftee comes down to the individual and it is anyone’s guess to know which path they’ll follow, so there’s an element of luck in it.
But maybe some clubs are better than others at encouraging individuals to head in the right direction
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