After 173 arduous days, the AFL gets underway for another season. We’ve spent the past ten weeks covering all manner of issues; let’s tie a bow on the lead-in to the year with some final thoughts, and the all-important predictions for the 2016 season.

Now, with less than 36 hours until the annual good first-quarter showing by the Navy Blues, we’ll have to try and cram as much of the remainder into a single column as humanly possible. Starting with…

The battle for the wooden spoon
Will Carlton, a team which was described by Champion Data in its 2016 prospectus as “the furthest a team has been away from a premiership in modern AFL history”, be better than Essendon, a team of spare parts?

The Blues’ pre-season has been perplexing. Fox Footy, somewhat drolly, came to the conclusion that scoring could be an issue for the Blues, after they amassed a total of 135 points in their three pre-season hit outs. West Coast nearly punched that out in three 22-minute quarters against the Bombers.

Carlton showed that their new coach, Brendon Bolton, has already made a tactical impact, introducing a more modern zoning defensive structure that will stand them in good stead as the side develops. The midfield looks like it will be okay, particularly if Patrick Cripps continues to come on and the likes of Marc Murphy and Bryce Gibbs have good years.

However, in the aggregate Carlton aren’t going to be good this year – everyone knows this. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place: playing the highly credentialled kids or playing the veterans will likely lead to the same outcome when all is said and done.

But will they be better than Essendon, the team that resembles a poorly assembled piece of Ikea furniture?

The Dons have built what looks to be a fine side on paper. Their defence shouldn’t concede mammoth totals week in, week out, even if it looks like a 12-year-old’s fantasy football backline after he spent all of his salary cap chasing midfielders. The midfield looks promising, with a good mix of veterans and youngsters, and continuity in the form of Brendon Goddard, David Zaharakis and Adam Cooney. It lacks pace, but pace was never a strength of this group. That gives Essendon enough to feel as though they will be, in the words of the big man himself, competitive.

This forward line could be a problem, though. Cam Rose noted in his preview – he has them in the spoon position – that just one player in his projected Bomber forward line kicked more than ten goals last season: Joe Daniher. It could be as simple as sitting an extra defender on him to cut off Essendon’s only reliable avenue to goal.

The other question is how far off the pace this team will look when the whips are cracking at the halfway point of the season. Essendon signed their final top-up player less than a month ago; every other club has had their full list together since December. That has to figure in our expectations.

This pair will be the bottom two in 2016. The next most obvious candidate is Brisbane, and as discussed on The Roar AFL Podcast, the Lions now have a midfield group that really shouldn’t be resulting in bottom-four finishes. There will be a team that drops away due to injury, but even then, the 16 non-Carlton-Essendon teams should have the depth to have these two sides covered.

So who gets the spoon? It has to be Essendon. The group of players they have assembled came together more than three months after everyone else had started their time trials, and the players the Dons have cobbled together were all out of the league for one reason or another after 2015.

The Port Adelaide conundrum
Since their mercurial rise to the top of the AFL ladder at the halfway point of the 2014 season, the Port Adelaide Football Club have won 18 of their 36 games, with a percentage of 110. In the 36 games prior to that, they were the fashionable pick for the flag last season, but in the end never rose higher than ninth on the ladder.

Those predictions were a classic case of recency bias gone mad: the Power were a couple of minutes away from knocking out the Hawks and barnstorming their way into the 2014 grand final. The Power probably would have won that game, given the dross that the Swans served up on that day.

I said it at the start of last year: being the fittest team in the competition is not a sustainable competitive advantage. So it proved.

Of the 36 games that preceded the most recent stretch of 36 games, the Power won 23, lost 12 and drew one (the final game of the 2012 season), with a percentage of 115. Plugging their wins and losses from that time into my Pythagorean expected wins formula reveals the Power earned almost precisely the amount of wins that they should have.

So does the Power’s recent mediocrity point to a structural change in 2016? Or was it the result of the typical growing pains that a young, rising list can expect to experience?

I suspect we will see both of these features. Port were figured out last year – the drive of 2014 was stopped with stonewalling and precise team defence, and it crimped their defining attributes.

The remarkable thing was that it affected their defence as much as their attack. Port’s points scored per game fell by nine points from 2014 to 2015, and their points conceded rose from 77 to 85. That’s a measure of the extent to which they broke down in the middle of the ground last season; they were 11th on defending ball movement that started in their own defensive midfield zone, a measure they would have been ranked significantly higher on in their preliminary final run. The net of those points for and against changes is a three-goal turnaround per game.

That is a lot to turn around in a single season – it is much easier to give that sort of margin up than make it up. In Port Adelaide’s favour though, is a much more amenable draw compared to last season. The Power ended up with the most difficult draw of the 2015 season, and based on last year’s wins and losses look to have the 12th-hardest slate in 2016.

There are enough very good players to suggest this is a top-eight side: Robbie Gray, Travis Boak, Ollie Wines, Hamish Hartlett and Chad Wingard were all in the top-50 conversation last week. Depth outside of their best 22 might be a problem, but with a team built like a stockyard of Tonka trucks, it isn’t likely to come into play unless something cataclysmic happens.

What does it all add up to? The Power won’t make finals this year, but that shouldn’t be the end of the world.

Fundamentally, this is a good team, that was temporarily made great by way of supreme fitness and tactical prowess. There is still time though, given the Power remain outside of the top eight on the age ladder, with just Jay Schulz over the age of 30 in this football year. Port are amassing a core of players with 150 to 200 games of experience – they have seven of them coming into this year – but it is important to consider that many of Port’s first-choice players have less than 100 games of experience.

Chad Wingard (89 games), Matthew Lobbe (84), Jasper Pittard (76), Tom Jonas (73), Wines (62), Jack Hombsch (61) and Jared Polec (45) are all written on Ken Hinkley’s whiteboard with permanent marker, and will grow together in the coming years. They’ve added Charlie Dixon and Jimmy Toumpas in the off-season, who fit this demographic.

It might not happen this year for Port Adelaide; that doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen.

Write off the Dogs at your peril
Speaking of young teams yo-yoing their way around the ladder, just a quick word on the Western Bulldogs.

Do not believe anyone that said they thought the Western Bulldogs would make the eight last season: they are lying to your face, and you should probably re-evaluate your friendship with them as a result.

Not a single credible person saw the Doggies coming, and they were one of the best stories of the modern Hawthorn era.

Part of the greatness of the Bulldogs’ 2015 season was the sheer funness of the way they played. They flipped the bird to boundary-line play, and gave precisely zero F’s about the forward press.

More than that, it was the people who played the roles. Every time Bob Murphy got the ball and stretched out those ageing calves, the whole footy world started smiling. There was Jake Stringer’s explosion onto the scene, and at least a handful of Marcus Bontempelli’s “holy crap he’s only 20 years old” moments every week.

Jack Redpath and Tory Dickson made one of the most unlikely forward line pairings in the League, yet were as effective as Travis Cloke and Jamie Elliott at Collingwood.

They seem to be a popular candidate for a slide down the ladder this season. Here’s something to give you pause for thought.

Since the year 2000, there have been 15 teams that have improved their percentage from less than 85 (the Bulldogs has a percentage of 81.9 in 2014) to more than 110 (the Dogs went to 115.1 in 2015) in a single season. In the following year (so 2016 for this Dogs outfit), eight teams went on to improve their percentage again, and seven fell back a little. That’s not useful at all.

However, just two of those 15 teams didn’t play finals in that third year.

We talk often about teams sliding back after surprising surge; the numbers say that the whole notion of a backslider might be bunk.

Write off the Dogs at your peril. There is nothing to suggest last season’s surge wasn’t sustainable; the only issue that could crop up is complacency, but one assumes coach Luke Beveridge – an Alastair Clarkson Coaching Academy graduate – won’t let that happen. Although, have you seen Jason ‘George Hill’ Johannisen recently?

The Paul Roos pause
Heading into this season, every AFL head coach has a contract for 2017 bar two: Alastair Clarkson and Paul Roos.

The pressure is obviously on Clarkson to deliver, with the brass at Hawthorn keen to see him sweat out the year as he chases the Hawks’ 19th premiership in a row.

But what about Roos? His three-year stint at Melbourne comes to an end after this season, after which we can all only hope he’ll rejoin Fox Footy and continue punking the punditry world with his wit and insight.

His anointed successor, Simon Goodwin, remains an assistant coach as of now, having served under Roos for two seasons – just quietly, could he have timed his move away from Essendon any better?

Roos’ instructions at Melbourne were both ambiguous and clear: sort the freaking club out. In 2013, the Demons won two games, and recorded one of the worst percentages (54.1) of all time. Only the final year Fitzroy team had a worst percentage since 1960, excluding the first years of the two expansion clubs. The club itself was haemorrhaging money, recording a loss of $3.1 million for the year.

The transformation under Roos has been stark, but remarkably, the playing stocks are nearly identical at the macro level to when Roos took over. Just 17 (seventeen!) players that started the 2013 year on Melbourne’s list remain in 2016, as the new regime cut as many ties to the previous era as possible.

The list of departures would make Melbourne fans sad, if any of them had lived up to their potential in their time as employees of one of the oldest sporting organisations in the world.

It’s almost as though Roos has hit the pause button, rather than pushing the team forward. To this point, it has most obviously paid dividends on the defensive front, with the Dees’ points against falling from a historically awful 122 to a just plain bad 93 in 2015. It has been driven by scheme and undoubtedly a focus on fitness and mental application by Roos, but it has also meant Melbourne’s offence remained around the bottom part of the table.

Roos faces a difficult balancing act this season. He must transition the team to Goodwin’s stewardship, while building on Melbourne’s improvements on defence – a points against of 93 isn’t going to help the Demons get anywhere except the bottom six – while beginning to free up the offence a little. He can do this by granting his players some more latitude with the ball in hand. Ball retention has been goal number one, conservative disposal number two, and slow play number three. Those are great ways to stop the opposition scoring, but make it hard to do so yourself.

There were signs of a shift in Melbourne’s game against Port Adelaide in week one of the NAB Challenge, but they remained signs. Melbourne’s style remained about control and ball retention.

Melbourne’s young playing stocks look substantially better than they did when Roos came in; right now, it looks like the Demons have nailed their last couple of drafts, and are well on their way to building a core of midfielders capable of dragging the team up the ladder in the years ahead.

After pressing pause for the past two seasons, it is time for Roos to hit the big, green, play button. Melbourne play Greater Western Sydney, North Melbourne and Collingwood as three of their first four, all of whom look set to play with attacking flair this season. Wouldn’t it be great to see what this group could do before Roos hands the keys over to Goodwin?

Are specialist small forwards back in vogue?
Last season, 41 players kicked 30 goals or more over the course of the season. That was a marked increase on the previous year, where just 27 players did so. But more interestingly, there was a substantial shift to specialist small forwards in this mix.

In 2014, there were nine small forwards that kicked at least 30 goals, who kicked a combined 399 goals for the year. Last year, 14 smalls made it over around 1.5 goals a game, kicking 645 majors. That meant that the goals per player of these small forwards (46.1) was greater than the tall forwards that kicked more than 30 goals (43.8) – something that hasn’t happened for at least five years.

Small players are increasingly in vogue in the AFL, as the game quickens up and becomes increasingly about dominating the ball at ground level. Small players tend to have more tools – not every big guy can be Lance Franklin when the ball hits the deck. Smaller, generally more agile players are able to manoeuvre their way around the zone based defensive structures most teams employ more effectively than the tall guys. And there is nothing stopping the short fellows from taking a hanger or two when the situation demands it.

Last year, Jay Croucher captured this much better than I can in a piece like this. Suffice to say, his call about Hawthorn’s forward line has come to fruition.

At one point last season, it look as though Eddie Betts might win the Coleman medal. After seven round, the fine wine Betts had 26 goals to his name, and ended up with 63 on the year. A quiet patch in the middle of the season cost him in the end; his ten best goal-kicking games resulted in 44 goals, comparable to eventual winner Josh Kennedy from West Coast (46) and runner-up Jeremy Cameron (44).

The introduction of the ‘90′ cap on the interchange will likely mean the forward line players of the game are rotated on and off the ground less often, instead spending stints through the midfield to allow the regulars to rest forward. That places more emphasis on having a group of very good small forwards. We might be about to enter a small forward renaissance period.

Stability and scatter guns
Brisbane’s midfield should be better than a -10.7 contested possession differential per game would have you believe. A line up boasting a core of Tom Rockliff, Dayne Beams, Dayne Zorko and Daniel Rich is good enough to push for the top eight, and with the supporting cast of B+ midfielders, genuine questions could be asked.

Indeed, Brisbane might be the best case study in why players like Tom Boyd are offered what look like ridiculously lucrative contracts. The Lions have a potentially outstanding midfield, but no one to kick it to forward of the ball.

The Lions are addressing this with a scatter-gun approach: Brisbane have ten players over 195 centimetres tall that are 21 years or younger. That is crazy! Great key forwards are like great key defenders, except they’re a little bit easier to find (ask Fremantle), and so the Lions appear to have decided to buy up as many lotto tickets as they could to improve their chances.

It likely won’t pay dividends this season, but Brisbane are putting themselves into a position of stability for the years ahead. The Lions are probably going to end up around the bottom four once again this season, simply because they lack reliable avenues to goal – Josh Green can’t be the leading goal kicker on a finals side.

Stability is the key for Brisbane. On the field, it should translate into consistency at selection, and hopefully a better run with injury so we can see this midfield at its peak. Off the field, all of the right moves have been made: Zorko has re-signed, Rich looks ready to re-sign, there are as many Queensland-born players on the list as there have ever been, and for better or worse, Justin Leppitsch has been saved from the tabloid vultures – at least for this year.

Interchange effects
So the interchange cap has been lowered to 90, and the sub vest is gone; is it actually going to do anything? No one really knows right now – all we have is theories.

The most popular one seems to centre on the idea that midfielders that would normally spend some time on the pine will now do their resting in their forward line. That seems to pass the smell test, given that there will be, for all intents and purposes, one rotation per player per quarter.

Let’s take that line of thinking one step further. If a midfielder will be resting forward, then for the most part a forward will have to spend a bit of time in the middle of the ground, no? This is where the ‘everything small is new again’ movement will come into firm focus.

Clubs that have quality small forwards who can win their own ball are likely to spend more time through the middle of the ground in 2016. The list of players that aren’t full-time key forwards or ruckmen that have both of these attributes is quite small (defined as winning six contested possessions and kicking more than a goal a game):

Gary Ablett
Eddie Betts
Luke Breust
Brett Deledio
Alex Fasolo
Robbie Gray
Shaun Higgins
Steve Johnson
Mark LeCras
Dustin Martin
Daniel Menzel
Paul Puopolo
Cyril Rioli
Jarryd Roughead
Jake Stringer
Michael Walters
Chad Wingard

Wouldn’t you know it, the Hawks have four of them.

If you exclude Ablett, Gray and Martin, who are already genuine midfielders, then we get a list of players that mostly plied their trade forward of the ball in 2015, and who we can expect to see play significant time, or significantly more time, as midfielders in 2016.

That’ll be one of the effects. The other will be that players with elite fitness will become a more valuable commodity, as their ability to keep on keeping on will free up rotation spots for the most burst-dominant players in the league.

But really, who knows what is going to happen. It’ll be one of those sneaky plot lines in 2016.

Richmond have early claim to be the top of the middle class
The Tigers will make good on their slow, steady build this season, and make the top four for the first time since 2001, and the fourth time in the past 30 years.

A lot of the talk about Richmond has been about what they can’t do, or what they’re missing, rather than what they’ve got. Like Adelaide, the Tigers have a superstar on every line: Jack Reiwoldt, Brett Deledio, Dustin Martin and Alex Rance make up fourth-fifths of an elite spine. Add in the perennially ‘good’ play of Trent Cotchin through the middle, and the supporting cast of solid-to-very good players, this is a team that can give everyone in the league a run for their money.

Indeed, last season they beat three of the top four during the home-and-away season, and came mighty close to beating West Coast in Round 12, as well.

For the Tigers to do well, though, their Swiss army knife Alex Rance must play every game, and employ his Jedi mind tricks on the opposition week in, week out. Richmond’s defence is likely to overtake Fremantle as the best in the competition this season, owing more to the loss of a key piece at Fremantle in McPharlin than any dramatic improvement by the Tigers.

Last season, Richmond’s defence was the best in the league from Round 10 onwards – after they ended Fremantle’s winning streak – and much of it was to do with the threat of Rance. He is Richmond’s most important player, and might just be their best. Coming into his 27-year-old season, he should be at the absolute peak of his powers.

But Richmond’s defensive prowess is made from more than that. Damien Hardwick’s defensive structures, which place an emphasis on clogging up the dangerous areas of the ground that can lead to effective inside 50 entries, have been just as important to this team’s strength. They don’t have any stellar one-on-one defenders outside of Rance, but they don’t need to.

The decision of who to put in the top four – behind the clear top three in Hawthorn, West Coast and Fremantle – wasn’t the most difficult of predictions to make this season. Sure, there were as many as four teams to try and fit into that one spot, but that pales in comparison to making a call on who gets into this season’s top eight.

Predictions for the 2016 AFL season

So with that in mind, here goes nothing. As per usual, if your team isn’t where you think they should be, it is because I hate you, your team and its fans, and I am hopelessly compromised and biased.

As ever, I’ve defaulted to the quantitative, and adjusted for gut feel.

Finally, many of the below predictions are presented as a list, and as a list only. We’ve spent ten weeks running through the reasons why teams should, and shouldn’t, have designs on finishing in certain spots, so there is little use repeating them.

Some very good football teams are going to miss out on playing in September this season. This also makes it hard for teams like Melbourne or St Kilda, or even Gold Coast, to have a surprising surge up the ladder. The logjam from fifth all the way down to 15th will be a rock fight all season, and I hold as much confidence in this being the final ladder as John Butcher’s confidence in his own kicking for goal.

Is that enough caveats for you? Okay good. *Gulp*. Here we go.

Home-and-away season ladder
West Coast Eagles
Fremantle Dockers
Hawthorn Hawks
——–
Richmond Tigers
——–
Western Bulldogs
Collingwood Magpies
Geelong Cats
Sydney Swans
——–
Adelaide Crows
Greater Western Sydney Giants
North Melbourne Kangaroos
Port Adelaide Power
Gold Coast Suns
St Kilda Saints
Melbourne Demons
——–
Brisbane Lions
Carlton Blues
Essendon Bombers

The top tier includes the top three sides in the competition, almost without question. Richmond are in fourth spot, and are a near-certainty for the final eight.

The next two tiers are the rock fighters for 2016: the Dogs, Pies, Cats and Swans are in the eight at ground zero, but any one of those seven teams below them have compelling arguments for being considered for those spots – roughly in the order that they are presented.

Finally, the Lions, Blues and Bombers will be bringing up the rear this season. They share a common question: where are the points going to come from?

2016 AFL premier and runner up
Premier: Hawthorn Hawks
Runner Up: Fremantle Dockers

While we’re at it, let’s throw some speculative guesses as to who can win the awards that matter, plus the awards that I made up that should be awards that matter. These are even more speculative than my estimation of the AFL ladder, because so much can happen that influences these individual honours.

Brownlow Medalist
If Nat Fyfe was able to win the medal in his 24-year-old season and missing four home-and-away games, he has to be the favourite in his 25-year-old season with ideally 22 games to crush opposition souls.

The biggest threats could come from one of the rising sides; Patrick Dangerfield, Scott Pendlebury or, indeed, Marcus Botempelli. Gary Ablett rounds out the top-five chances – I can’t imagine all of this talk about him being ‘passed it’ sits well with the GOAT.

AFLPA MVP Winner
History suggests this is a sticky award – it remains with the best player of the time for a number of years. So even if he doesn’t win the Brownlow, this will be Fyfe’s award until Bontempelli sheds his youthful cocoon.

AFL Coaches Association Award Winner
The coaches love accumulators. Let’s throw this award the way of West Coast wing man, and 2017 free agent, Andrew Gaff. He came fifth last season, behind midfield cogs in Dan Hannebery, Fyfe, Josh Kennedy and Matt Priddis. This will be the year of the line breaker, and he’s got the potential to be the best in the business.

AFL Coach of the Year
Alastair Clarkson will win the Leonardo DiCaprio lifetime achievement award. It is a testament to his greatness that he hasn’t won it, despite stewarding his team to three straight flags.

Coleman Medalist
Is it too easy to pick West Coast’s Josh Kennedy?

Yeah. But that’s for a reason. He’s the key forward of the most potent traditional offensive structure in the league. Jeremy Cameron would have been a sneaky choice here, but he’d have to kick 20 per cent more goals per game than Kennedy to break even, let alone beat him. Adelaide’s Taylor Walker could be an outside chance, particularly if the Crows make the eight.

Now let’s make up a few awards that should exist, and then crown a player at the end of the season. These are awards that should exist anyway, and in an increasingly commercial AFL world, why isn’t there a Mortein Nature Guard Defensive Player of the Year, or a Musashi Quasi-Legal Supplements Most Improved Player of the Year?

Defensive Player of the Year
If this was an award, it would have to be Alex Rance’s for time immemorial. The other contenders would be Easton Wood (who looks to have bulked the hell up and become more daring in the off-season), Daniel Talia (the non-KGB-wannabe Talia), Eric MacKenzie and Collingwood’s Jack Frost, who has already been immortalised as an AFL Micro Figure. I’m not kidding.

Most Improved Player of the Year
Last year it would have to have been Jake Stringer, and this year the pick would have to be fellow Dog Bontempelli. The Bont has already put together the best 30-odd games in Champion Data’s fancy ratings history, and with the Dogs expected to back up their surging year, he’d be candidate number one. Everyone is eligible for this puppy, so take your pick as to the rest of the field.

Comeback Player of the Year
This award has a narrower eligibility criteria to most improved: the player having missed large chunks or the entirety of the 2015 season due to injury, illness or poor form, comes back and plays at a very high level. The field is diverse, ranging from Ablett to MacKenzie. In fact, any of Gold Coast’s blue-chip midfield could be eligible, if they ever get back on the park.

My pick would be West Coast’s MacKenzie – he is going to love returning to West Coast’s help-oriented defensive scheme.

And so ends the 2016 AFL pre-season.

We’ve put in hours of reps on the track, studied the opposition, and are ready for the first bounce. There are 198 games of AFL football to be played between now and the last week of August. I look forward to watching and analysing them with you once again.