Australian uni league: A solution for player welfare and quality?

I have read many impassioned and intelligent articles on this site about how to solve various problems from player welfare to the quality of our game. I’d like to have a crack at an idea myself.

The NFL is the world’s most successful sporting league. We know that the AFL looks closely at this league for ideas and Gillon is a big fan, as was Andy D before him.

The NFL is also similar to the AFL in a number of ways. Compared to other codes, the number of games is small; NFL teams only play 16 games a year, and of the 32 teams only 12 make playoffs.

The playoffs consist of 11 games in total – compared to the nine AFL finals games. Compare this to 80+ games a year for US hockey/basketball and 160+ for baseball, or 30-40 for soccer leagues.

We share similar issues with American football with the lack of representative play (being essentially one-country sports) and injury risks.

There are many odious characteristics we wouldn’t want to take on, such as the mercenary nature of the industry that sees players routinely in court with their teams or refusing to play while holding out for more money. However one very interesting part of the American football culture I wanted to talk about was the college football system.

The college football competition is massive in the US (basketball is also a significant college sport). Players will spend four years (usually) in the college system before moving onto the pros; colleges compete for the best players and pack stadiums every week. If you’ve never watched a college football game, by the way, do yourself a favour.

The stands are packed with both students and everyday fans, brass bands play and rivalries are ferocious.

We all know this is the product of a hundred years of growth and wouldn’t happen overnight in the AFL, but let’s look at some of the other advantages to the sport. Picture a system whereby the minimum age to join the AFL is raised to, say, 21 or 22.

The expectation would be for young players to leave high school and play three or four years in the uni system before they reach the AFL. I can see advantages.

Young players become far more of a known quantity – they would enter the draft with mostly-grown, mature bodies and having had three to four years of playing in professionally-coached systems with proper fitness and conditioning. The draft becomes less about “luck” and becomes a real advantage to the teams with high picks.

The pressure placed on an 18 year old who is picked high in the draft and thrust into the media spotlight, expected to carry his struggling new team back to success, can often lead to player welfare issues.

The brain of an educated 22-year old would be much more equipped to deal with this kind of pressure (and would also know for sure that professional footy was the life they wanted).

The AFL is keen to turn the draft into more of a media occasion like it is with the NFL; again, this comes about because fans have already seen a lot of these college players, know the good ones and are excited to see where they end up.

Quality of the AFL. There are numerous commenters on the fact that with 18 teams of 40+ players, there’s a lot of ‘filler’ on AFL lists. A big contributor to this is the fact that poor teams are incentivised to pursue ‘youth for youth’s sake’. If you’re on the bottom of the ladder, the expectation is that you have a lot of 19 and 20 year olds and you play them, instead of playing the 26 and 27 year olds who would provide a better quality of football.

In the event, there are only so many of these kids who become AFL-standard footballers and most draftees end up off of lists within three to four years.

Then there’s equalisation. I have already stated that I think the uni system would help improve the safety of draft picks, which helps bottom teams. But a big issue for bottom teams is that rebuilds mean 19-year olds and 19-year olds are a big risk. Most don’t come through, and you have to carry them, usually losing, while you find that out.

If you have a worse than average strike rate with draftees, you can get stuck at the bottom for many years. Imagine if a team like Melbourne of the past 10 years could have outsourced that risk to the uni system – plucking only the 22-year olds who had already proved their worth.

Finally, it allows bottom teams to sell hope sooner. The fan doesn’t have to wait five years for these high picks to start turning things around, because the 22-year old uni league star key forward would be virtually ready to come in and impact straight away like the star college quarterbacks can do in the NFL.

Finally, from a non-footy, player welfare point of view, AFL players would finish their careers in their late 20s or 30s holding a university degree. This would go some way toward mitigating the hard road that past players need to tread when they can’t find media or coaching work.

Similarly, most of the 22 year olds leaving the university system wouldn’t make pros, just as it is in the US, but these young guys have a degree and some kind of pathway into an alternative life. This makes them much better suited than having left high school and done nothing but footy for four years.

So what are the cons? Obviously we would need to create interest in the league, where there is currently no interest in university footy in Australia. Firstly, if the league has all of the best 18-22 year olds playing in it instead of in the AFL, I think you go a long way to fixing that issue.

What you also have is a league populated with teams who already have rivalries. Compared to most new leagues or expansion teams, a university league would have built-in animosities between cross-town schools, which saves you needing to ‘manufacture’ rivalries to make fans care about your teams. To use Victoria as an example – the old firm of Melbourne versus Monash would be a rivalry, with the upstarts like Latrobe and Deakin keen to use the league to increase their status.

Who might suffer from such a setup? It would likely disadvantage the state leagues, which are currently the number two tier for fans of football.

There are older players (this is a bald 35 year old author calling 26 year olds older, but you know what I mean) who can still make a living in those leagues who may not be able to do so with weaker state league.

Arguably though, if AFL teams were less obsessed with filling their lists with youth for youth’s sake, such mature players could still find work on AFL lists.

State leagues are becoming little more than de facto ‘reserves’ leagues anyway, with state league teams forced to coach in the best interests of AFL affiliates. Uni teams would not have such restrictions, they would fight for their own success.

The other group which may suffer are those who are unable to meet academic minimums to keep their places in a university, and one can imagine this would disproportionately affect those from underprivileged backgrounds with poor prior schooling. Programs would need to be in place to make sure the league remains open to all, which is one of its great strengths.

Thoughts, readers? It’s not something that could be implemented overnight, but it’s hard to deny some of the potential.