AFL not even a little bye-curious

Have you ever heard the saying that you can disregard everything someone has said before the word ‘but’? Well, I’m not an AFL basher, but… I can’t believe their stonewalling position on the scheduling of the bye.

Their intractable steadfast death-grip on their version of events would make Kim Jong Il blush, even though he’s dead and lacks the required blood flow to make that physiologically possible.

This year they’ve not only toyed with fatigue as a tool to create extra scoring, but also seemingly instructed umpires to speed up play-on calls at marks and free kicks, and attempted to reduced boundary thrown-ins (aka stoppages) with the pressure of arbitrary deliberate out-of-bounds rulings.

So, in light of all that, there might be a suspicion that the bye would have added value to teams this year. Yet what happens in the first week that teams returning from a bye (Adelaide, Collingwood, Carlton, Richmond, St Kilda, Gold Coast) come back into play? They play teams who not only haven’t had the rest, but two of them come in off short breaks (one coming off two consecutive six day breaks), and travelling interstate to boot.

So what happened then? You’d have to say, with the exception of Richmond and Carlton (who pretty much did as expected), that all of the teams coming off the bye were far more successful than most objective observers thought they would be.

It’s a big turnaround from recent years where statistics have shown there was an advantage to be gained from playing the side coming off a bye when your side haven’t. It looks like the prime suspects for this change are the aforementioned rule and umpiring changes.

Not only that but, if the reasoning is due to fatigue built up over 12 or so rounds of footy, there’s no swings and roundabouts to it in this season for those teams who are scheduled a later bye. They’ll be playing teams who have had a recent rest.

In fact there’s every chance they may get the wrong end of the stick again, as it’s more likely the old bye effect, where teams coming off the bye struggle, will resume.

The AFL’s response? ‘Tough titillations fellas, is too hard for us to take that into consideration, what with all our financial decisions and not wanting to have too many short breaks (!!!).’ They’ve simply given up on the problem as either too hard, or not important enough to prioritise, or both.

Surely there’s enough resources floating around that they could commit to constructing a fixture that is capable of meeting enough of their draw to-do list and also takes into account the potential bye anomalies.

For instance there’d be more than a couple of dozen ex-CSIRO egg heads, who have had their jobs sacrificed for their inconvenience, at a loose end and likely more than willing to take on a problem solving-project for a song.

Put together a team of statisticians and logicians and get them to work on creating an algorithm that develops a draw to cover all your priorities appropriately. Or maybe reintroduce a second bye.

I don’t necessarily expect them to commit to anything at this early stage, other than an acknowledgement of it as an issue they are willing to fix, and that they will do all that is feasible to do so.

This article isn’t so much about the fixturing of rounds in and around the bye. In many respects you can understand that they based it on method from previous years, it being not so easy to foresee the change in dynamics around the bye.

But at least, where some of the top of the table fancies have been thrown through the grinder, at least show you might be interested in fixing it in the future – especially when you are looking at increasing the fatigue factor again next year.