The Roar
The Roar

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The AFL's 17-5 fixture system won't eliminate tanking, it'll encourage it

Editor
15th May, 2015
36
1345 Reads

Despite being one of the most professionally run competitions in the world, the AFL’s approach to fixturing has always seemed imprecise compared to other leagues.

The NFL uses an intricate, but accessible, formula to generate a fair fixture each year, while the Premier League simply sees each team play each other twice. With the AFL, you can hazard a pretty good guess as to who your club will play twice, but really there’s no way of knowing until the fixture is launched.

In a bid to make the home-and-away season more predictable but exciting at the same time, a radical proposal has emerged from AFL HQ that employ a ’17-5′ model with the fixture.

But no matter how you do the maths, this ’17-5′ model just doesn’t add up.

For those unaware, the 17-5 model would see each team play each other once over their first 17 matches, before the competition is split into thirds for the final five rounds.

The top six jostle for finals positioning, the middle six duke it out for a September spot and the bottom six fight for better draft picks.

The reasons for change that its supporters give are simple: By giving all clubs something to play for over the final few weeks, there’ll be no more meaningless games. What’s better, by making clubs compete in some way for the top pick, tanking will be eliminated almost instantaneously.

The fixture will be fairer and fans will have a reason to see their team play right up until the end of the season, what’s not to love?

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As it turns out, just about everything.

The most concerning of all the misconceptions is easily the belief that this model will eliminate tanking. A club in 12th place at the conclusion of Round 15 would be well aware they aren’t a premiership chance. Under the 17-5 model, a club in such a position would have the choice of: (a) Playing to win in their next two matches, cementing a spot in the middle six and giving them a shot at what will almost certainly be a futile finals campaign or; (b) ‘Experimenting’ in their next two matches, falling into the bottom six and then clobbering the cellar-dwellars to get a higher draft pick.

Similarly, a club hovering around sixth after 15 games would have to weigh up the benefits of: (a) Winning their next two games, booking their spot in the finals but also setting themselves up for five consecutive matches against the competition’s best, versus; (b) Throwing the next two games, making them earn their finals spot, but also allowing them to have a crack at some of the also-rans.

We can argue all day as to whether clubs would actually be devious enough to do such a thing. We can argue all day as to why either option is smart or stupid, but at the end of the day we shouldn’t be discussing it at all, because teams shouldn’t have to make those decisions in the first place.

Teams don’t aim for the top four because it looks good on their resume, they do it because finishing at the top end of the ladder gives you a significant advantage in the finals. How do you reach the top four? By winning games – that’s the only way.

If you spread chocolate chips throughout the ladder, teams will be drawn to them, regardless of which direction they have to travel to get there.

The only way to ensure teams try to win every match they play, is to put all the rewards at the top. The 17-5 model would not only fail to eliminate tanking, but would in fact give many more teams a reason to start.

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The second most worrying misconception the model’s supporters have is that meaningless games would be a thing of the past.

Would a five-match run to September that needs to reset everybody’s points to zero in order to work not render the entire season of footy that preceded it meaningless?

Going through 17 rounds of football (18 if you include byes) to decide which one of three ‘zones’ you’ll be in, where you’ll then decide the order of the ladder in just over a quarter of that time has to be one of the most nonsensical proposals ever floated.

Theoretically a team could go 21-1 for the season, but because that loss came in the final five weeks, finish second to a team that went 11-6 in the first leg but found serious form at the end.

The other obvious problem with separating the final five rounds from the first 17 is that you run the risk of locking a team out of finals contention prematurely.

At the conclusion of Round 17 last year, Richmond were mere percentage points out of 13th, imagine if they’d been locked into the bottom six and had their historic winning streak count for nothing?

Brett Deledio of the Tigers Celebrates Richmond would have been stuck in the bottom six in 2014 under the proposed 17-5 system, their miracle run to the finals non-existent. (Photo: Anthony Pearse/AFL Media)

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There are better ways to add spice to a Melbourne-St Kilda game in August than throwing the first four months of the competition out the window.

Another perceived benefit of the 17-5 model is that it will maintain fan interest throughout the course of the season by giving the lesser teams something to play for.

Nothing sells tickets like success. But while a team’s home crowds grow as the wins pile up, so too does the number of fans who travel with them when they play away.

Last season, GWS were able to enjoy a home games against North Melbourne and Collingwood over the last five weeks, raking in more than 10,000 people to each match – excellent figures for the Giants.

But under the 17-5 model, they would have played those games against either the Western Bulldogs, Carlton, Melbourne, Brisbane or St Kilda.

Would GWS have been a better chance to win those games? Yes. Would any of those games pulled close to 10,000 people late in the season? Absolutely not.

There are obvious logistics issues that arise from having five weeks of football not finalised until five days before the first of those matches is due to be played, but asking one demoralised fan-base to travel to the ground of another similarly disinterested fan-base is not at all conducive to maintaining fan interest.

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This all said however, poking holes at the 17-5 model is somewhat of a waste. The AFL is yet to justify the need for a radical fixture overhaul in the first place.

Looking at the bigger picture, the meaningless late-season match is not a problem unique to the AFL at all. Every sport on the planet pits its also-rans against each other at some point.

If the AFL genuinely believes that interest can be manufactured by dangling a draft pick in the faces of the fans, then they’re demonstrating a worrying lack of understanding as to why fans do and don’t go to the football.

The AFL faces a number of challenges going forward as it looks to cement its status as Australia’s premier sporting competition, but the 17-5 model of fixturing creates more problems than it solves.

If the AFL has fixturing ideas that will benefit the competition – I’m all ears. The 17-5 model however is clearly not one of them.

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