A third of the way into the season, just one of last year’s top four teams is currently in the double-chance spot.

Are North Melbourne, Geelong, Sydney and the Greater Western Sydney Giants really the best four teams in the AFL?

The four are a motley crew of contrasting styles, and as it happens, they play each other a lot in the next month.

So far this season, the Swans have beaten the Giants, and the Giants have beaten the Cats. North Melbourne have missed the party all together thus far.

In Round 10, the Swans host the Roos on a Friday night. In the following round, the Giants travel to Kardinia Park for an early-season rematch with the Cats, while the foursome face off in Round 12 with a Sydney derby rematch and an Etihad date for the two Victoria teams.

We’re about to see some high-leverage games, particularly if these teams remain in or around the top four as we head into August.

As it stands though, there is a high chance that this isn’t the top four at all.

Two teams currently sit with a 6-2 record that aren’t in the top four by virtue of their percentage – the Western Bulldogs and Hawthorn. The Sweet Home West Coast Eagles sit in seventh on 5-3, with a 130 percentage that would have them around the top four in most seasons. And let’s not get started on the quagmire which has emerged from eighth through to 11th, but perhaps as far as 15th after the Tigers showed they may have remembered they are good at football over the weekend.

Still, the numbers say the top four tends to settle quite early. Since the year 2000, an average of 2.6 of the top four have been in place after eight rounds of footy – round up to three if you must – while in the past three seasons, three of the top four have been in place. At a bare minimum, two top-four finishers have been in the slot in every year bar one: 2005.

In that year, West Coast retained their top-four spot earned at Round 8, but the Cats, Tigers and Dees gave way to Adelaide, Sydney and St Kilda. The Swans surged from being outside of the eight all together into fourth, while the Tigers slumped to a 2-12 finish and collapsed to 12th. Crazy stuff happens, but not often, and certainly without any degree of predictability.

So, what chance to we give for each of the current top four to remain in place?

North Melbourne Kangaroos
Chance of remaining in the top four: 60 per cent

The 2016 Roos have done almost the precise opposite of the 2014 and 2015 Roos: win early in the year. At the same stage of the past two seasons, North have been 5-3 and 4-4, and been chasing their long, muscly tails in the second half of the year. It’s worked out well for them though, given they’ve made preliminary finals in both of those years.

They were a contender coming into the year, but after mixed results in the home-and-away season for two straight years, that was all they could be.

I said we’d know by June if they could play their best football on a sustained basis, and throw themselves into the flag mix as a result. Well, here we are, a couple of weeks away from June, and they have a not insignificant chance of entering the winter months as an undefeated team.

They face the rampant Blues, before the aforementioned Friday night game against the Swans – in Sydney, so there’s where the undefeated doubt creeps in – and a second Friday night game in Tasmania against the Tigers takes them to the halfway point.

North are almost certainly a finalist from here, and are on track for a win total in the mid-to-high teens.

There are two things that eat at their top-four chances, though. Once the Roos hit the turn, they play Geelong, Hawthorn, Adelaide and West Coast in consecutive weeks, and then face the Western Bulldogs, Hawthorn, Sydney and Greater Western Sydney in their final four games. That’s two brutal stretches that will test the team, but it would still take a catastrophe to miss the eight altogether.

Banking enough wins, particularly against fellow top-four aspirants, could still prove a challenge.

The other is that North Melbourne’s 8-0 start isn’t necessarily a reflection of the underlying performance of the group.

Their offensive and defensive performances suggest they’re a five or six-win team, while the Roos have won all three of their close games. When adjusted for strength of schedule, their percentage dips from 123 to 110, which would peg them as the eighth-best team in the league.

As they say, the only number that really matters is wins on the board, but if we’re projecting forward, there’s enough there to suggest some caution is advisable.

Geelong Cats
Chance of remaining in the top four: 2000 per cent

They say humility is important in this sports writing caper (not that you’d know it reading most folk, but I digress), and so with that in mind I admit that I got a lot of my pre-season thoughts about Geelong wrong. We went over it last week so I don’t want to spend much time revisiting it here, but suffice to say, all of the questions I had about this team in 2016 have been answered in the affirmative.

Are they too tall and slow? No, their height and size is a competitive advantage.

Will Patrick Dangerfield solve their clearance woes? Yes, both by himself and through externalities.

Is Joel Selwood broken? Absolutely not, he might be in career-best form.

Can a slow defence hold up against the smaller, nimbler attacks in the competition? Yes, because the ball comes with little frequency and almost never dangerously because of Geelong’s midfield.

Geelong will likely end up the minor premier from here, given they’re still to play eight of the bottom ten and don’t travel out of Melbourne to face any of the current top eight in their run home. Their smash-mouth football is a throwback to years gone by, but it is oh-so effective.

Greater Western Sydney Giants
Chance of remaining in the top four: 60 per cent

AFL teams everywhere, you are on notice.

Good luck stopping this sort of thing, @AFL #AFLGiantsSuns pic.twitter.com/yb3fC50uQ0

— Ryan Buckland (@RyanBuckland7) May 15, 2016

If the Giants aren’t on your radar as an AFL fan, you should probably get a new one. As it stands, they are going to be around when the whips are cracking this year, and are set up for a sustained run at the flag for the rest of this decade. Hyperbole? Nah, this is real.

In the past five weeks – so it isn’t an aberration – the Giants have taken 34 scoring shots per week (league average for a winner has been 28), and kicked scores of 151, 126, 158, 95 and 149. Many of those games were against weak opposition, but when you consider that the 149-plus lines are three of the top six scores on the year, it doesn’t matter. This group of players, with their power, speed and clinical use of the ball, particularly by hand, are primed to make good on a strong start to the year.

There are still some questions regarding depth. The Giants were stomping all over the league at the halfway point last year, and then they lost Shane Mumford, Phil Davis, Steven Coniglio and Joel Patfull to injury in a single game. Losing Mumford, the lone mature ruckman, and Davis, then the lone hand in the key defender stakes, was too much for the team to absorb, and as the season dragged on the Giants gradually fell away. They’re still not particularly deep in those positions, and so a repeat dose of injury would hit their prospects.

We’ll get to the Giants in some detail in the weeks ahead, but for now, believe it when I say you will soon need to know your Josh Kellys from your Nathan Wilsons from your Adam Kennedys. The Giants are coming, people.

Sydney Swans
Chance of remaining in the top four: 80 per cent

Sydney’s transition from old to new, from both a personnel and tactical perspective, has occurred much quicker than most – including yours truly – expected. The Swans have abandoned the war of attrition that defined their past, and instead play with reckless abandon, both at stoppages and when the play opens up.

This has benefited, or indeed been driven by, the born-again Lance Franklin, who has tossed aside any doubt that he might be on the decline like a kick for goal from the centre square. Effortlessly, he’s put himself back into the ‘Best Player in the League’ conversation, now that Nat Fyfe is out and Gary Ablett Jr is looking structurally mortal.

Right now, Franklin’s counting stats are on a higher level than he achieved when he finished third in the Brownlow medal in 2014. He’s leading the Coleman, and also the League in score involvements, having been involved in more than a third of Sydney’s scores this season.

Some are questioning whether Sydney are relying too heavily on their superstar. It’s an interesting debate to have, but is somewhat irrelevant so long as he’s able to play at this uber-high level. For example, if Franklin eventually commands a double team, and is somehow brought back to Earth as a result, it simply makes things easier for the remainder of Sydney’s forward line. If this is Sydney’s biggest problem, it is an excellent problem to have.

The doubt about Sydney heading into the year was whether their young talent injection would lead to a temporary dip in the team’s potential. That’s proven to be off base; Isaac Heeney kept Sydney in the game over the weekend, Tom Mitchell plays like a 15-year veteran, and we should call Callum Mills ‘Mr Natural’. The rest of Sydney’s young brigade look like turning into solid, multi-year contributors. The rotation is underway, and is being allowed to happen because of the high level of play of the usual suspects.

Their first game of the year was a statement, but we all thought it was more to do with Collingwood than Sydney. They’ve continued forcing this wide open style that there were signs of last year, and it is proving very effective. Sydney have pumped the ball inside their scoring zone a remarkable 63.1 times per game in 2016, a league-leading mark, and up almost ten from last year.

But in a sign of how they like to have the ball pinging around, they’ve conceded 51.1 per game, up a shade (2.7 per game) from last year, but it means the total inside 50 count – for plus against – for Sydney’s games is the highest in the League. It’s a decent proxy for game pace, but not perfect.

There are still questions hanging over the defensive set, particularly one on one and even more particularly against pace. The Swans haven’t played the toughest draw to this point in the year, though, and it gets a bit tougher in the weeks ahead. But the Swans don’t miss finals, and in recent years have made a habit of making the top four, so with six wins in the bank, they’re looking likely once again.

As much as I’ve framed this as the chances of teams remaining in the top four, the fact of the matter is it is often what the teams below managed to do, rather than what the teams at the top manage to avoid, which governs this kind of thing. We’re only a third of the way through the season, and so there’s plenty of water to travel under the 2016 season’s bridge.

Hawthorn are, as Jay Croucher put it last week, a switch-flick away from stream-rolling the competition, as evidenced by their third quarter against Fremantle over the weekend.

The Demons, as Cam Rose put it last week, are playing well enough that a winning season is in prospect, and it only takes a couple of lucky breaks to get to 13 wins from there.

The Western Bulldogs probably won’t lose at Etihad for the rest of the year, the Eagles won’t lose at Subiaco, and the Crows have emerged from their hellish first eight with an even slate.

The first third of the season is in the books, and while we’ve learned heaps, we still have no idea who’ll win the 2016 premiership. The race for the eight has re-commenced in the past couple of weeks after looking all but over, and the fight for the double chance is looking like a year-long rock fight – among not just the current holders of the immunity idol, but the aspirants nipping their heels, too.

It feels like we’ve spent eight weeks opening the puzzle box and tipping out its contents. The next five weeks leading into the bye rounds will help us sort out the pieces, before we even think about putting the damn thing together in the second half of the year.

The footy gods are delivering on their pre-season promise of a hotly contested season.