There are numerous problems facing the AFL these days, including drugs, racism, the continuing and inexplicable existence of The Footy Show, and the way Bruce McAvaney keeps saying, “He’s got a long leg”.
But these problems will probably always be with us, or at least can only be solved by a lot of very boring hard work that frankly wouldn’t be worth it.
But a problem that just might be solvable in the short term is that of scheduling and the pre-season. There are a couple of issues in this area that need addressing.
The competition has 18 teams and is played over 23 rounds, which even the most rudimentary arithmetical education will equip you to realise cannot possibly add up to an equitable draw.
The pre-season competition – now dubbed, fairly sarcastically, the NAB Challenge – is the most depressing time of the sporting year and does not so much warm up footy lovers for the season ahead as force them to wonder just what the point of it all is.
The NAB Challenge continues to make use of the nine-point ‘supergoal’, which is just stupid as hell.
Let’s look at the first problem first, as weird as that seems. In order for a draw to be genuinely fair, every team has to play every other team the same number of times.
So there are two options: a 17-round season, or a 34-round season. Or, I guess, a 51-round season, but then you’re looking at some extremely rushed end-of-season trips and the high-risk behaviour that comes with fit young men trying to fit all their unwinding for the year into one week.
Now, a 17-round season has the drawback of being less lucrative than the current configuration for the fancy cigar-smoking billionaires who own football.
You could fill the spare weeks with an elite interstate representative competition, but the modern AFL player is a preening, pampered showpony lacking the mental and physical courage and overall moral fibre to risk life and limb in a State of Origin clash. Up to now the players’ general wussiness has proven intractable, so we are caught in a pincer between the cigar-men and the ball-wimps.
So a 34-round season it is. This will please the billionaires enormously, and if the players risk injury and burnout, at least they’re risking them for their clubs, which is much more satisfying to today’s gutless wonder than the glory of state representation. And although playing so many games does make injury more likely, it also increases an injured player’s chance of getting back on the field before the season ends. There is very little downside, really.
OK, so, to the pre-season competition, which is a misnomer in itself, as it involves no competition whatsoever.
Once upon a time it was an actual competition, with a trophy and prizemoney and everything: but the clubs decided they didn’t care about that, so they stopped trying.
So the AFL decided to make it even less worth caring about and invented the NAB Challenge to make us all sad, because even though it’s not even real football it’s still on TV and gets reported on by journalists as if it’s an actual thing, wasting untold resources that could be spent on better grand final singers.
Now, the best thing to do would be to cancel the pre-season altogether and keep every team’s playing list inside a hermetically sealed aluminium can between seasons.
However, as noted above, footballers are soft-centred prima donnas who insist on ‘preparation’, so some kind of pre-season seems necessary. But without the genuine competitiveness of the season proper, the pre-season is dull and uninspiring and really, really annoying. So what’s the answer?
The answer is: make the pre-season a proper competition.
For a start, force the clubs to play their best 22 in the pre-season competition. For every best-22 player they rest in the pre-season, they lose eight competition points in the regular season.
Secondly, make the prize worth the fight. The main season doesn’t need to offer great material wealth as it is full of history and glory and all that crap, so pump all the season’s prizemoney – and more – into the pre-season. If you’re offering a million dollars per player for the winning team, you can bet there’ll be some pretty sincere efforts put in.
Also, the pre-season competition – let’s call it the ‘NAB Millions’ – should be lengthened to about 10 weeks to make it substantial enough to really sink our teeth into.
And now to the last problem – the rules of the NAB Millions.
Obviously we need to get rid of the supergoal, because the supergoal is the formulation of a congenital moron. But that doesn’t mean the idea of altered rules is inherently terrible.
We need some way to differentiate the pre-season product, so rule changes are definitely in order. They just have to be more interesting than “oh yeah, let’s make goals from outside 50 worth nine points because we suck”.
Here are five changes I propose for the NAB Millions:
1. High tackles are legal. In fact they’re not only legal but rewarded with free kicks 20 metres downfield.
2. Goals may be scored with foot OR head.
3. Players must wear heavy winter coats.
4. Players may dispute any umpire’s decision either by requesting a video review, or trial by combat. But three unsuccessful reviews results in the team having to don another layer of winter coats.
5. Instead of a bounce, the umpire begins the game by firing the ball skywards out of a t-shirt cannon.
So there we are. An exciting 10-week pre-season competition, followed by an exciting 34-week season, followed by four exciting weeks of finals.
Big money on offer in pre-season, the pure pursuit of sporting immortality in the season proper. Forty-eight weeks of magnificent sporting action, leaving a generous four weeks for players to let off steam and take cocaine in casinos before coming back, raring to go for the next year.
The football is better, the football is fiercer, and most importantly, the football is hardly ever not on.
Isn’t that what we all want?
Star GWS defender Sam Taylor has resisted the urge to return home to Western Australia by signing a bumper seven-year deal to remain with…
Morris believes the Tigers shouldn't be resting Dustin Martin from this week's match to allow him to play his 300th game at the MCG.
"What you get suspended for in the modern era, you wouldn't even get free-kicked for 20 years ago!"
An outstanding local footy performance from the Richmond legend!
West Coast will head to the AFL Tribunal in an attempt to downgrade star midfielder Harley Reid's two-match suspension for his sling tackle on…
"My kids in Melbourne could see it was touched!"
