A new AFL year begins, with incredible promise

It’s 2016, and you know what that means? We’re only 11 weeks away from the start of the 2016 AFL season. There’s no time to lose: let’s begin our season preview, right here, right now.

Towards the back end of last season, we started talking about how the AFL was perhaps as ‘even’ as it has been in years.

Not even in the financial sense, or in the talent stakes, or crowd attendance, or quality of facilities, or… You get the picture.

But on the field, more than any season in recent years, it felt as though a team in the top six wasn’t a shoe-in against one from the bottom half of the table.

Part of that was likely the Fremantle Dockers, who streaked their way to top spot before coasting/sputtering (depending on who you ask) to the September finish line. Part of it was perhaps the underwhelming Port Adelaide side, who confounded everyone by being responsible for two of Hawthorn’s six regular-season losses for the year, but missing the eight. Part of it was the unfamiliarity of Geelong on the wane, or West Coast’s ahead-of-schedule rise, or the Western Bulldogs’ way-ahead-of-schedule rise.

And yet, it took 13 wins to make it into the finals series. The bottom four of Carlton, Brisbane, Gold Coast and Essendon won a combined 18 games for the year, which was the same as Fremantle amassed (including their Week 1 finals victory). Six teams didn’t break the 80 points per game mark, one of them scoring below 70. Hawthorn and West Coast, the season’s premiers and runners-up, were ranked numbers one and two on my offensive efficiency rating (OER), and first and fifth on the opposing defensive efficiency rating (DER).

What’s going on here? The answer gets to the heart of what we can expect to see in the 2016 AFL season: perhaps the most even competition for a decade.

Winners keep winning, and losers are losing harder
But first, some stats. Footy’s status as a near-structure free, free-flowing contest between a team with the ball and a team without it means offence and defence are interrelated. It’s why Hawthorn and West Coast finished at the top of both OER and DER last season – you can only score when you have the ball in hand.

Scoring has been on the wane in the AFL for more than 15 years, since the Bombers last tasted finals success. At the turn of the century, the average AFL side could be expected to score 101 points per game, and scores of close to 130 were quite regular. In that year, 27 per cent of all regular season games saw 200 points scored – a figure which has not come close to being matched in the years since.

In 2015, the average score was 87 points per game, a small improvement on the 50-year low recorded in 2014. However, despite the average points per game falling by 15 since 2000, the number of games that went over 200 points has collapsed to 9.4 per cent.

The difference is reconciled by one fact, and one fact alone. After falling from a historically anomalous 120 in 2000, the average score for a winning AFL team remained roughly unchanged since 2002: it tends to fluctuate between 105 and 110 points per game. Last year it was 105.9. But the average score for a losing AFL team has declined significantly from 81.8 points per game in 2000, and hit a record low of 67.2 points per game in 2015.

Good sides still put up good scores, consistently. But in the increasingly professional AFL, bad sides are finding it more and more difficult to score.

A score of 100 points or more would result in victory 82 per cent of the time in the year 2000. In 2015, it would result in victory 96 per cent of the time. That phenomenon is repeated right across the scoring curve, suggesting as the AFL has continued to evolve over the years, a game requires fewer and fewer points to be scored in order to sort out a victor.

This hides a peculiar detail which I uncovered when breaking down scoring patterns in the AFL (if you are averse to mathiness, skip ahead to the fun stuff at the next sub-heading).

In 2012, the average team in the top six at the end of the home-and-away season had scored 0.5 (0.5342) standard deviations above the average AFL score; that number has steadily declined each year since, hitting 0.3 (0.3404) standard deviations in 2015 – the lowest mark since 2007. The mirror has occurred for the bottom six sides, although last season’s end-of-year fadeouts by Carlton, Brisbane and Essendon halted what was a clear trend.

What does this all mean? It says that despite the top-line numbers showing the difference between a winner and a loser on any given day, the gap between the best and the worst sides over a full season is closing. At a high level, it appears the league is just about ready to return to the days of the mid-2000s, after the competition went all whacky around the time that Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney came into being.

Settling down
Between 2009 and 2011, the Gold Coast Suns and Greater Western Sydney Giants hoovered up an obscene amount of AFL-quality talent. This was all at the behest of League HQ, who, in learning lessons from previous expansion sides, knew it would take both quantity and quality to get the two new kids on the block going.

In the 2009 offseason, the Suns signed 12 players from around the country that were not quite old enough to make that year’s national draft, and pinched a further 12 from the Queensland and Northern Territory recruitment zones. Then in 2010, the Suns were granted six of the first 10 picks in the draft, as well as the 11th, 13th, 15th, 26th and 43rd picks (many of which they traded away for existing talent).

That year also saw the Suns given the ability to sign up to 16 uncontracted players from current AFL clubs in a one-way free agency set-up, and had an extra $1 million in the salary cap to facilitate the moves. The Giants were afforded similar concessions between 2010 and 2011.

This allowed the two new clubs to build monstrous war chests of AFL player capital, which they could either use to build from within, or to assist in greasing the trade wheels. But it also meant clubs that ended up around the bottom of the ladder (in 12th position or lower) in those years didn’t receive the usual spoils.

Who were those clubs?

Melbourne and Richmond finished there three times, Brisbane twice, and a number of clubs once. For the Dees and Lions, their mediocrity couldn’t have come at a worse time, and in many ways their continued poor performance can be partially pinned to expansion.

But really, all that this collection of drafting capital by the expansion sides has done is delay the distribution of talent around the league.

Of the 40-odd preselected, undrafted or mature-age signings, and top draft picks made by both Gold Coast and GWS in their first two years of existence, more than half ended up playing for other teams. The list is quite amazing, and I won’t run through each name, but here’s a snippet of each.

Gold Coast wheeled and dealed their way through Charlie Dixon, Tom Hickey, Tendai Mzungu, Dayne Zorko, Jonathon Ceglar and Maverick Weller. That’s a solid list.

But check out who was selected by Greater Western Sydney: Adam Treloar, Taylor Adams, Jamie Elliott, Steven Morris, Luke Brown, Jake Neade, Dom Tyson and Sam Frost. These players were all taken in the concession period by the Giants, and have now forged careers at other clubs – many plying their trade in black and white stripes.

It means that the Suns and Giants are heading into the 2016 seasons with lists primed to rise up the ladder; right now I’d wager the Giants will finish ahead of the Suns, mostly because I like the mature-age talent that Greater Western Sydney have assembled more than I like that which is available on the Coast.

As we discussed in October last year, the Suns’ mature age players have been a near-cataclysmic failure, particularly when compared to the Giants. That came into play last year when the Suns lost their entire starting midfield.

But it also means that the impact of these concessions has, for the most part, washed its way through the system. Last season’s bottom four – Essendon, Gold Coast, Brisbane and Carlton – made up close to half of the first round of the draft, and indeed did make 50 per cent of the first-round selections (if the academy selections made by Brisbane, Greater Western Sydney, and Sydney are removed from the equation).

Keeping the successful, successful
By contrast, this cycle has benefited the teams that finished around the top of the ladder in those years. There’s no doubt the likes of Hawthorn, Geelong and Collingwood are incredibly well-run franchises; the Western Bulldogs and St Kilda do a pretty bang-up job with far fewer resources available. But with the regular growth and decay cycle of years gone by temporarily halted by the expansion teams, clubs with established talent heading into this period were in a position to do well.

The teams that finished in the top six this year were all in well into list-building mode when the expansion sides came along. Here’s the average age rank and games played rank for last season’s top six in 2011, when the full impact of the draft distribution hit the league (data courtesy of Draftguru):

Other than the permanently old Sydney Swans, who until this upcoming year had gone to market with a list in the top six for both age and experience every year since 2009, each of these five clubs did most of their hard rebuilding yards in years prior.

All of this is to say the last five years of on-field action in the AFL have been influenced by the advent of two new clubs, and the strain on list-building this caused.

Now that this appears to have settled down, the league is on the verge of returning to something more akin to the 2000s, where eight different teams won the premiership in an 11-year window.

Over those 11 years, every club tasted some finals action, and the vast majority of clubs had between five and seven winning seasons (ending the year with more than 11 wins).

Compare that to the past five years, since Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney have been in the league, and it makes for some interesting reading.

Part of the difference is because we’re only halfway to a directly comparable period. But I’d wager a significant part of it is because of the issues discussed above.

By my reckoning, 2016 is set to be the most even year of AFL action in close to a decade, when the Sydney Swans and West Coast Eagles’ rivalry was at its peak, and the Geelong and Hawthorn juggernauts were in their embryonic stages.

If you have any doubts, try this: sit down with a piece of paper, and write the name of each team. Then, think about which ones you would consider crossing off as no chance for the eight at this point in the year.

I’ve done this exercise, and I only feel completely comfortable doing so with one team: Carlton. There are questions to be answered by every team, sure, but do you put a line through St Kilda? Melbourne? Geelong? Collingwood? Brisbane? Indeed, the two expansion teams?

What are those questions? That’s what we’ll spend the next 11 weeks finding out, and answering, together. If all goes to plan, we’ll be doing so with more than the written word.

The 2016 AFL season starts now.