Is there anything wrong with the AFL fixture?

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. When fans, clubs and administrators can begin to draw a line on what was, and begin to look meaningfully into what comes next: the release of the AFL fixture for 2016.

In fact, I’m so excited that my usual Wednesday column had to be split in half. Here’s part one. Part two, which is centred on something I’ve wanted to write about for a while now, is coming tomorrow.

The AFL is expected to release the 2016 fixture on Thursday, after spreading a few crumbs last Friday, and releasing the full first round of games at 11pm (EST) on Saturday night.

That’s a little strange, but that’s neither here nor there.

These aren’t particularly interesting details: Carlton and Richmond again get opening night, there’s no footy on Good Friday, and the Hawks and Cats will face off on Easter Monday. Sounds quite familiar. A little tired, in many ways.

We learnt yesterday that Carlton won’t be getting any Friday nights this year. This is a glorious result for humanity.

The AFL’s fixture is one of the most potent and important policy levers. The scheduling of who plays who, when and where, affects financial performance, fan engagement, and on-field equalisation – and that’s just the first round effects.

All of the AFL’s stakeholders have wants and needs. The AFL even takes formal submissions from the clubs on what they would like to see, leading to some interesting and sometime remarkable requests. Getting it right is remarkably difficult (the AFL employs at least a handful of resources to do it), and relies upon maximising the pursuit of many, sometimes conflicting, goals.

Need proof? The introduction of Sunday night football in the 2014 schedule was hailed as the dawn of a new must-watch time slot. It lasted a single year, as slightly weaker than expected TV audiences combined with much weaker than expected crowds and a general ‘meh’ from the AFL community conspired to see it wiped from the slate.

By contrast, Thursday night football, at one point in history seen as a minor nuisance caused by starting the AFL season on Easter weekend, has become a staple of the calendar.

Since the introduction of the AFL’s 18th team – our new football overlords, the Greater Western Sydney Giants – the game’s fixturing system has remained pretty stagnant. Each team plays 22 games over 23 rounds, 12 teams once and 5 teams twice, with a bye period some time around the middle of the season.

There have been some tweaks to the way the five double-ups are determined. At first, the ladder was split into three groups of six based on final finishing positions (including finals), and each team played the five opponents that were in their same group twice.

That was the golden rule, but it was broken when it didn’t suit individual circumstances.

The classic one is intrastate derbies. West Coast and Fremantle simply must play each other twice, because, you know, derbies are fun, and so the rules were bent to fit games of similar stature in when they didn’t suit the profile. Similar marquee match-ups, like the regular opening round fixtures, or Victorian blockbusters, were also retrofitted.

This led to some accusations that the draw was ‘tainted’. There were also concerns, legitimate ones, that fixturing based on performances in the previous year was near meaningless by the end of the season, given how things change from year to year. This led to a tweak to the system in 2015.

Instead of playing each member from your six-team group twice, you played three of them twice, and then played one team from each of the other two groups twice. In many ways, this is quite an elegant solution to the problem of fitting derbies and marquee match-ups in. A marquee opponent match will either be one of your three in-group opponents, or can become your double-up from another group.

That’s great. But it’s hardly ideal.

Most see that the overarching goal of the fixture is to equalise the competition, by giving each team a roughly ‘equal’ set of 22 games. This is an incredibly challenging goal, and one that I would argue is not only impossible in the architecture that the AFL has set up for itself, but is not worth the effort pursuing.

The current system doesn’t do a great job of providing each club with an equal draw. There’s been a lot of talk about this on Twitter in recent days, and I came across a remarkable stat: Paul Puopolo has played 13 games against Sydney, but just three against Brisbane, in his 100-plus game career.

It’s difficult to define what ‘equal’ would mean, but a useful starting point would be that the higher a club finishes on the ladder, the more difficult their draw should be relative to the average. So Hawthorn, who won the 2014 AFL premiership, should have had the most difficult draw in the league in 2015. St Kilda, who won the wooden spoon, should have had the easiest.

That isn’t how it ended up. Hawthorn had the 14th hardest (or the fifth easiest) draw in 2015, while St Kilda had the 10th hardest. Melbourne, who finished 17th in 2014, had the fifth hardest draw, while Richmond, who finished eighth, had the 17th hardest (or second easiest).

They are the outliers, but they are more the rule than the exception. Just six teams played a schedule that was within three positions of the 2014 ranking. It’s a familiar pattern – it happens every year.

So the natural question is: what can we do better? I have a solution, but I want to devote a decent amount of time to it. Come back tomorrow for that one.

Instead, let’s have a brief look at some of the other solutions which have been proposed in recent times.

Shorten the season to 17 games
I’ve heard arguments that the schedule should be 17 games, with everyone playing each other once in a round robin format, and then bam you have an equal schedule. That’s an incredibly simplistic, ill-considered argument, and one that I think comes from the perspective of sport existing on that undefined higher plane.

First of all, it’s not possible. The AFL’s broadcast agreement locks the league into 198 regular season games, meaning the 22-game season isn’t going away. And if this is your view, ask yourself a question: do you really want to see your favourite team and players on the field five less times every year?

The 17-game fixture would not automatically equalise things, either. What happens if you catch Fremantle sans Nat Fyfe? Or play Hawthorn in one of their four Tasmanian fixtures? There are far too many variables at play to apply such a blunt solution.

Create a conference structure
Another is the introduction of conferences; two or three groups of teams, loosely affiliated, that can help guide the fixture. This could be carved in many ways, but most seem to think a 6-6-6 team split would be most effective.

This, again, is an intuitive change. Teams get to play each member of their conference twice (10 games) and then play each member of the other conferences once (12 games). That takes us to the 22-game season, and creates some semblance of equality. Finals teams could then be defined as the top two of each conference, and the two teams with the best record that don’t fit into that criteria. It’s interesting, I’ll give you that.

But, again, it is nothing more than band-aids and elastic bands. What happens if over the past five years you have St Kilda, Brisbane, Port Adelaide, Melbourne and Greater Western Sydney in your conference?

And how do you go about allocating non-Victorian teams, of which there are an uneven number? Three doesn’t go into eight, and avoiding three trips to Perth or Brisbane or Adelaide would become a structural advantage for some teams. It’s a better show than the 17-game fixture, but I just don’t see it.

A more natural structure in this respect would be splitting right down the middle, and going for a 9-9 arrangement. That way, each conference could have a representative from each non-Victorian state, limiting the travel induced structural advantages and disadvantages.

But the game carve up is a little less natural under this system. Teams would play each conference opponent twice, for a total of 16 games, leaving six games remaining and nine non-conference opponents.

A solution to this would be to play each non-conference opponent twice over a three-year stretch, which would mean the schedule should be equal over the cycle. But that again doesn’t take into account who you play where, and at what point in the list management cycle they are at. It also means derbies can happen twice in only two out of three years. That’s not going to pass muster.

The other option would be to play a 25-game season, of course, but I don’t think that’s going to happen without some much more fundamental changes to the game.

This ‘equal draw’ thing is hard.

Fortunately, that’s not the main game here. It is but one of many objectives. Your perspective on professional sport colours your response to the fixture, what you think it should and shouldn’t do, and whether you think it should change.

I fall firmly in the sport is entertainment camp, and that leads me to have particularly strong views on the opportunities change can bring.

So in this respect, its been great to see a range of ideas floated throughout 2015, from a variety of camps. These all centre on making the best of the AFL – Friday night games, and the run to the finals – even more exciting. There’s been another, but as I say I want to give that one a bit of space to breath, so we’ll cover it off tomorrow.

‘Float’ the Friday night schedule
The first is a floating Friday night schedule. The AFL made a mistake scheduling in Carlton for six Friday night games in 2015. Carlton, by virtue of their sudden loss in ability to play football, lost each of those by an average of 10 goals. The AFL has put a stop to this for now, but it is worth considering a mechanism that could stop this from happening period.

Why not schedule in the first, say, dozen Friday night games for the year, and then leave the rest as a one-month notice floating schedule? The AFL could pick a game of the week for those final 10 games, based on what looks likely to be so, and that could be done within the confines of constraints like six-day breaks, venue availability and other overrated blockers.

I mean, if that other winter code can manage to do it, why can’t the AFL?

Eddie’s Gap Week
Another is Eddie McGuire’s idea of taking a week off between Round 23 and the start of the finals. In his eyes, this would reduce the need for teams to rest their players in the final round of the year, which is true to a point.

But more importantly, McGuire has said the AFL could consider using the week to wrap the season, hand out awards – which, as McGuire points out, are all based on the home-and-away season – and potentially bring back representative footy in some way.

I’ll add another event to this season end week: some kind of all-star show.

Fox Footy dipped their toes into the novelty waters on grand final day this year, with the Fox Footy Longest Kick, which is exactly what it sounds like. I thought it was an excellent package, and brought a real carnival atmosphere to the big day. Why not have something like that in the Gap Week, but add a specky competition? Or a goal-kicking competition?

Wildcard Weekend
The final one is the notion of a wild card weekend leading up to the finals, where the teams ranked seventh and 10th and eighth and ninth after 22 games do battle in a weekend before the finals proper get under way, to qualify for the final two spots.

This is another somewhat elegant solution to the issue of teams resting players to gain a perceived advantage in the first week of finals, as teams will either be trying to qualify for September or have an enforced lay-off.

And you can’t tell me that wouldn’t be an exciting way to kick off the finals series.

What do you reckon, Roarers? If you could change the fixture, what would you go for?

There is a school of thought that says things are fine as they are, and the AFL’s product is humming along nicely. Change shouldn’t be for the sake of change, so any new ideas should be given much more thought than a few paragraphs of prose. Tomorrow, you’ll see what I think.