In May, I got a bit too excited when I saw three numbers quoted on AFL Media’s website. Those numbers were 17-5. What is 17-5, and why do I care so much? I’m glad you asked!

The AFL’s prime minister, the Hon Gillon McLachlan, is a man of change.

From his actions since taking over the top job, we know that his default response to a problem is to find an innovative solution. And for a student of the law, he’s got a great handle on economics.

So when many of the finals-bound sides decided to rest swathes of players ahead of the final game of the season in preparation for the real stuff – some within the rules, some outside of them – McLachlan’s response was music to my ears.

We can’t legislate, so we need to look at incentives. And the best way to go about that is to change the fixture.

It was the second time that McLachlan has talked about changing the fixture in 2015. The first time was in May, when he pitched the so-called ’17-5′ model to club chiefs. They poo-pooed it, with some tenuous reasons cited. McLachlan, we’re told, is a massive fan.

I wrote about 17-5 in June last year, when the ‘shorter season’ crowd was out in force. At the time, I thought I was some sort of evil genius, but it’s been doing the rounds in a variety of forms over the years, so I can’t claim to be the one who thought of it (I don’t have that many tickets on myself).

But to the best of my knowledge, there hasn’t been a full range of thoughts devoted to it, beyond a 600-word article from AFL Media. Today, that changes.

What is 17-5? As I say, I’m glad you asked.

It’s an opportunity to make the game we love even more great, and to create a completely new phase of the season. It can solve problems, both real and perceived, with the current schedule, and opens up a whole new world of possibilities. But to get there, the league and its stakeholders are going to need to make a concession or two.

The AFL is in the business of entertainment. Let’s get a fixture system that has this ideal at its core. The fixture, as the league’s sharpest policy instrument, should be used to build the most compelling, exciting, engrossing competition it possibly can.

As we discussed yesterday, there is a case to be made that things are fine as they are, and that there is no pressing need for a change to the fixture. That may be true, and in fact I would feel comfortable mounting an argument that it is. The AFL just banked its biggest broadcast pay day ever, TV numbers are up and crowds are, at worst, breaking even on recent history.

But that’s not the right way to go about analysing this. Changes to the fixture should be viewed as a way of improving the game’s amenity, making it more appealing to fans, and helping to grow ahead of the next broadcast agreement negotiations.

As they say in business, adapt or die, and while the AFL is very clearly the number one winter sport in this country – you don’t see the AFL CEO stepping down during rights negotiations, after all – this status is only assured as long as the AFL keeps its eyes out for ways to improve.

A fundamental shift in the fixture, such as the 17-5 model, isn’t about ‘fixing’ anything. It is all about making the most out of what the game has to offer.

And the environment is ripe for change. All of the signs are there: the CEO likes the concept, it’s been talked about for a number of years, and with the advent of a new broadcast agreement in 2017, the timing is right. It’s a big change, but one that could greatly enhance what is already an excellent competition.

The 17-5 fixture looks like this:

• Each team plays the other 17 teams once in the ‘first phase’ of the season.
• The league is then split into three groups of six: a top six, middle six and bottom six.
• This ‘second phase’ of the season sees each group of six effectively play a round-robin tournament for their remaining five games.
• Finals remain as they are now, with the qualifying, elimination, semi, preliminary and grand final structure.

Quite nifty, no?

What I like about this is that the five double-up games are, all things being equal, matching up teams of generally equal skill and ability in a more elegant way than the current three-group structure. It would see each of the top six play off before the finals proper commence, and create the preconditions for a few more exciting additions to the schedule over those final rounds.

The current method of allocating double-ups doesn’t work as it is intended. Last season, Hawthorn played the fifth easiest schedule of games, while Melbourne played the third hardest, according to my strength of schedule system. While the fixture shouldn’t have a goal of equity as its central tenant, that is a tough one to swallow.

There are drawbacks, sure. The clubs like to know who they are playing throughout the season, so they can manage their lists accordingly. This structure would result in the final five rounds being somewhat unknown, although not completely so. The uncertainty was raised by the clubs as a drawback of this proposal in May, but I don’t buy it. It’s just a matter of changing the way you do business, surely.

Administration and logistics would become a greater challenge, with clubs and the league more broadly unable to provide definitive booking for travel, venues, accommodation and the like with as much notice as they have grown accustom to.

This, again, is somewhat overplayed. AFL clubs are anchor tenants of their respective grounds during the winter, while there isn’t exactly a shortage of airplane capacity or hotel rooms for travellers who aren’t price sensitive. This would be very easily overcome.

Perhaps the most legitimate concern is the unevenness of the numbers in each phase, and how this impacts upon the home-and-away ethos of the season. The 17-game first phase would necessitate that half of the league play nine home games, and the other half play eight; and the five-game second phase would result in half the league playing three home games and half playing two.

A lot hinges on home games, including memberships and with them club finances. This one is a bit tougher to crack. You could guarantee each team plays nine home games in one season and then eight in the next, but how to deal with the second phase is a real issue. Let’s park that for now.

One of the other legitimate concerns is how the teams’ incentive structures change with the advent of the three six-team groupings at the two thirds mark of the season.

Any time you create an arbitrary line with risks and rewards, incentives are created. Things get tricky when incentives are created. Which is where perhaps the more controversial element of the 17-5 proposal comes in: what are the groups playing for?

There’s many possibilities, too many to explore here, so I’ll limit this to what I think will happen, and then I’ll provide a view on what I think should happen.

If 17-5 is to get up, the only way it will get passed the clubs is for the change to be as minimal as possible. So while the teams would be split into streams of six after 17 weeks, phase two of the season is merely for fixturing purposes. That is, there aren’t ‘groups’ of six that are locked in, and each team can still qualify for the finals over their final five games.

It means every game becomes a caller’s favourite ‘eight-point game’, while loosely tying the fortunes of the final two spots in the eight to a battle of teams in the middle part of the ladder.

The benefit of keeping the final eight open is that a 2014 Richmond, who came from a record of 3-10 after 14 rounds to 7-10 after 17 rounds, can make it into the eight.

This is a really minor change in the scheme of things. But it creates an incentive right around that 17-games-played mark. For a club that is straddling on the border of two groups, there is a big incentive to move into the lower group in order to secure a second phase match-up against a weaker set of opponents.

For argument’s sake – and this isn’t a great example because under the current structure not every team had played everyone else after 17 games this year – let’s take Round 17, 2015 as a marking point.

Each team had played 16 games (except Geelong and Adelaide), meaning they were all coming into the final game of phase one of the season. Richmond and the Western Bulldogs were in fifth and sixth position on 40 premiership points, while Adelaide (38), North Melbourne (36) and Geelong (36) were in seventh, eighth and ninth respectively.

All things being equal Richmond and the Western Bulldogs have an incentive to not win, hoping that one of the teams below them does win and takes their place in the top six for phase two.

It’s only a theoretical incentive – and I’m certain mildly positive the AFL would watch it very closely – but it is an incentive nonetheless. And after this year’s Restapalooza, we know better than ever that clubs respond to incentives.

That’s where a more fundamental change comes in. A crazy, this-wouldn’t-happen-in-such-a-conservative-organisation change, but one that would bring the 17-5 model into its own. Instead of playing the final five games of the season as a natural extension of the first phase, lines are drawn and stakes are raised.

The top six automatically qualify for finals, and are playing off for double chances and home field advantage.

The middle six are playing for the final two finals positions.

And the bottom six are playing for a better chance of securing a high pick in the draft.

Just to make things more interesting, let’s say that under this fixture model, the first phase of the competition counts simply for seeding in the second phase, and is used to work out home field advantage.

So the first three teams in each set of six earn three home games, and the remainder get two. That could lead to some teams playing 12 home games and the others 10 in a single season, but over the long run it should equal out.

The top six play a round-robin tournament, where the winner locks in home field advantage throughout the finals, just like in the current system. The meaning of every game is amplified, because not only are you playing to influence your run to a flag, you are facing off against your prospective finals opponents at the pointy end of the season.

There are, by my reckoning, very few meaningless games, because the round-robin format and compressed five-game schedule make it possible for a team to earn a double chance all the way up to the last phase two round. Sure, there’s a chance that a team is 0-4 after four games, but it’s worth noting that in games between the top six this season, the team ranked lower (based on Round 23 ladder position) won 10 games, while the team ranked higher won nine.

Imagine the excitement of a Hawthorn versus West Coast match in Round 23 that would determine who travelled to whom in the first week of the finals? Or the fun of watching Fremantle face off against the Western Bulldogs for the right to a double chance?

But wait, I hear you cry, what about Richmond’s 2014 run? Well, as I found last year, Richmond’s run was almost historically unprecedented, at least in the AFL era. And as I also found last year, 7.25 of the AFL’s top eight teams tend to be locked into place after 17 games.

If this analysis is replicated, but looking at the top six rather than top eight, we find that 5.5 of the top six are in place after 17 games. The 17-5 fixture might work against a 1-in-100 Richmond style run to the finals, but the benefit of giving great meaning to those final five games for the finalists outweigh that 10 times over.

In the middle six grouping, the payoff for success is, quite possibly, even greater.

The final two spots in the finals would be up for grabs, and once again given the first 17 rounds count for nothing once the second phase gets underway, a team like this year’s Port Adelaide could still make it into September if it were to hit a good patch of form as it did this season.

In effect, the last five rounds of the season for this group becomes an extended wildcard play-off, and like the top six there’s only a narrow chance that a team is out of the running with more than a game to go.

While it’s not a perfect comparison (because the final five games weren’t a round-robin tournament), if we have a look at the 2015 season, this was the phase two ladder for the teams sitting seventh to 12th after 17 games:

Team	Ws	Ls	%
Adelaide	4	1	173.8%
Port Adelaide	4	1	120.8%
North Melbourne	3	2	104.1%
Geelong	2.5	2.5	97.2%
Greater Western Sydney	2	3	95.0%
Collingwood	2	3	91.8%

Port Adelaide would have made the eight, while the Roos would have missed out, saving us all from the acrimony of North Melbourne’s mass resting in Round 23 (heh).

But what if a team or two are out of the final eight running with a game or two to go? What are they playing for? That one has me a little stumped. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Finally, the bottom six. This is the portion of the ladder where the fixture conservatives point to saying 17-5 doesn’t work. That’s because, well, what are the bottom six playing for in phase two?

Draft picks. Or, more specifically, a better chance of securing a higher draft pick.

If 17-5 were to be introduced as a three bracket tournament, it would open up the opportunity to bring a completely new draft pick allocation system to the AFL, based on how it’s done in the NBA. For the sake of neatness, let’s completely rip off our American cousins and call it a Draft Lottery (I would like to think the AFL would be able to come up with something cooler than that).

Rather than automatically receiving a draft pick based on your finishing order, instead teams receive a weighted chance of receiving a particular pick in the draft. The lower you finish, the higher your chance of securing a top draft pick.

The idea of this system, at least in the NBA, is to reduce the incentive for teams to straight up ‘tank’ a season in order to guarantee a high pick in the draft (which given the NBA is a five-man sport, is one of the only sure-fire ways to build a successful team). It works, to a point. Just ask your Philadelphia 76ers fan friend whether it stops out-and-out tanking.

But instead of allocating a higher chance based on how many losses a team acquires, under the 17-5 system, the bottom six phase two tournament could be a play off to increase your chances of being allocated a high pick.

It couldn’t, or wouldn’t , be an all-or-nothing proposition, because that would risk locking a team into a cycle of terribleness (some clubs do a good enough job of that as it is). Rather, phase one of the season being would be worth 50 per cent of a team’s draft chance rating in negative order (that is, the worse you do, the better your chance) and phase two being worth the other 50 per cent in positive order (the better you do, the better your chance).

The precise mechanics are too detailed to go into here. But this would, in effect, give those teams in the bottom six a reasonably strong incentive to perform at their upmost in their final five games, to give themselves a better chance of capitalising on their mediocrity in phase one of the season. You could also extend this system out to the middle six group that don’t make it into the final eight, giving the third-placed finisher in that group more ‘chance points’ than the team that comes last.

Another point of contention would be resetting premiership points to zero once the groups are created. Under the current system, a team that has a really good start to the year, but then coasts to the line either due to form or injury, would lose its advantage earned in the first part of the season.

Take 2015’s Fremantle side: massively out in front at the start of the season, before stuttering to the line. The issue is that this stuttering would mean the first part of the team’s season was rendered useless in determining anything bar it earning a finals berth.

One way to go about this would be to give teams that finish at the top of each group a little bit of a head start: give them two or four premiership points, and the rest of the group zero. All things being equal, then, a team that finished in first place in the first 17 rounds could still lose one game and end up in a top two position once the second phase of the competition is complete. It seems like a small reward, but it could have quite a large impact.

It could get complex. But no more complex than draft picks being converted into draft points for four teams, right?

Footy’s overarching narrative in 2015 has been all about change – well, everywhere except in the last game of the season – and these kinds of discussions will, hopefully, become more common place in the future. Change is difficult, but when it’s done right, and for the right reasons, it can make great things happen.

There are many options and ideas as we discussed yesterday. But in my mind, this one has them all covered.

The commencement of the AFL’s new broadcast agreement in 2017 gives it a once-in-six-year chance to implement some big reforms. I hope changes to the fixture are forthcoming, if only to make what is already a great competition even better.