Already making your AFL 2018 predictions? Don’t be daft

Welcome to the post-truth Australian Football League, where the rules of the previous decade have been tossed asunder and anyone can win the last game of the season.

Were it not for Sydney’s stellar second half of the season comeback, that statement would be the Gospel according to Gil. Cast your mind back to the end of the 2015 season just briefly – really put yourself in that moment – and consider the below has come to pass in the past two seasons.

Hawthorn was eliminated in a semi final in 2016, and missed the finals series all together in 2017. Sydney crashed from a losing grand final in 2016 to an 0-6 start in 2017, rallied back to miss the top four by a game (and top two by a game and a half), only to lose a semi final against their bunnies.

Geelong successfully staved off a rebuild that was five years coming, and has made it to a preliminary final in the past two seasons. The Western Bulldogs won a premiership, winning four in a row (including two interstate trips) as sizeable underdogs, breaking a half century premiership hiatus.

Richmond won a premiership, coming from a flattering 13th the year prior to finish in the top four for the first time in more than 20 years. Theirs was not quite as long a dry spell as the Dogs, but the fans were certainly parched.

Then there are a few sub points.

Dustin Martin became the best player in the competition, and won the league’s three most prestigious individual awards in a single season. Patrick Dangerfield won a Brownlow medal with a record vote tally in 2016, and had a better season in 2017 to run second to Martin.

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)

Nat Fyfe, the 2015 Brownlow medallist, has become an afterthought for most of the football world. Essendon, ravaged by WADA suspensions, bashed together two teams into one – like a Holden panel beater working on a Ford – and rode some kind of wave into September.

Port Adelaide rose like Lazarus, an ascent that no one saw coming, only to fall in one of the great finals of the decade. Greater Western Sydney hasn’t made it into a grand final, nor, as it were, won a premiership.

Gold Coast still hasn’t made a finals series, and might be the worst team in the competition as we enter 2018. Melbourne and St Kilda, who’ve rebuilt the traditional way, fell just short of the finals series two years running, as all of this goes on around them

And that’s just the big picture stuff. To those who may have taken a break from following the game on account of Hawthorn fatigue: hello, welcome, and yes, this all happened.

If you can weave that into some grand narrative you are a better person than I. For two seasons we have revelled in the glorious chaos of increased parity; the promise of the 2016 pre-season has come to pass.

Where does that leave us? It is not the time to make bold predictions, settle on team line ups, or pick a premier. We will discover these things over the next 71 days as the preseason unfolds. There are, however, a handful of trends we can look to as a scene setter for the year ahead.

The experience cycle has turned
The AFL lost plenty of on-field intellectual property last season. The retiring class of 2017 included almost a full team of players who’d played 200 or more AFL games – if Luke Hodge had pulled the pin we’d have got there – six of them reaching the 300 game milestone.

Every year, some 9,108 games of experience are added to the league through the 198 home-and-away season games and nine finals. Generally speaking, the league as a collective loses about that through delistings and player retirement. Last year, the outflow of experience was significantly larger than the inflow of experience: 11,019 games of football IP have been lost.

It meant the league as a collective lost experience for the first time since the 2012 season, from 62.1 games per player in the 2017 preseason to 61.4 games per player here and now (we use per player to adjust for the advent of the two expansion teams). Last off season marked the end of a six year streak where the collective experience of the league’s players increased from 52.1 per game (a post-2000 season low).

A quick parse of the data suggests the league’s aggregate experience level is cyclical, with long periods of steady growth and decline. The last time the worm first turned – the 2007 preseason – the experience level of the league fell for six straight seasons, through 2012, where it started to rise for six straight seasons.

Such a small dip from one year to the next, or a per-player basis at least, is not going to drive the competition one way or the other. But it is interesting to consider the role that veteran players play.

As of the end of last season, there were 70 players with 200 games of experience, or close to four per team. With 21 of those stepping out, just 49 remain. It is one less old head, wise and worldly, and available to help the coach on field.

At a headline level this would look to hit the West Coast Eagles the hardest. The Eagles dropped a staggering 1,485 worth of AFL games from their playing list in the 2017 offseason, or almost half the average AFL list.

However, 650 of this was two one-year wonders: Drew Petrie and Sam Mitchell. Still, Matt Priddis (240), Sam Butler (166), Josh Hill (173) and Sharrod Wellingham (171) were long term, consequential players for West Coast.

(Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Media/Getty Images)

Essendon have been similarly impacted by player departures, losing 1,195 games of experience. Unlike West Coast, the Dons partially offset this at the trade table, with Jake Stringer, Devon Smith and Adam Saad bringing in 246 games of collective experience.

In net terms (considering delistings, trades, free agency and the draft), there has been a shift in the league’s experience to South Australia. Adelaide and Port Adelaide have added a combined 865 games of experience to their respective lists as they load up for premiership tilts.

All things considered, a shift in the experience profile of the league could be expected to affect the ‘softer’ skills of the game: positioning, team defence, composure and the like. Indeed, that is likely to have been the biggest driver behind the most surprising move of last off season: Luke Hodge’s move to Brisbane on a two year contract, after announcing his retirement from the Hawks.

Qualitatively though, it is hard to go look past the metaphoric changing of the guard that began last year. Most of the champion players of the early part of the decade are now out of the game, and the opportunity for the next batch to drive the league forward is clear.

Total team football
The past two premierships have been won by teams without traditional forward line set ups. The Western Bulldogs steamrolled their way through forward half congestion with a blend of mid size and small players, who ran rings around taller defenders.

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)

Richmond played one conventional tall forward for the vast majority of the home-and-away season, and doubled down during their finals campaign.

It led me to ponder whether going small in the forward line – or smallball, because it’s not a thing until you put a label on it – was the way of the future. It is a significant shift, if only because convention dictates a team’s centre half forward and full forward should be taller than the average, at least.

The wrinkle of course is Adelaide’s scheme, which coalesced to give the Crows almost two goals a week extra scoring punch than second place, is centred on tall players. Adelaide’s system had four tall forwards and two smalls – the binary opposite of Richmond if there was such a thing. And now Charlie Cameron, Adelaide’s pace ace, has left for the Lions, it is likely the quartet of talls will be called upon to do a little more of the heavy lifting while the Crows figure out what to do at his spot.

There is still a trend here. The best teams find a way to use their best players in complementary ways: they play a system which fits their personnel. Defence has evolved in this way since the Malthouse days of high pressing, but the Dogs, Tigers and Crows suggest scheming forward of the ball, rather than kicking forward and hoping a tall guy takes a mark over another tall guy, is a way to bust team defences.

Pace, right across the ground, is also critical. This is an issue I’d like to spend some more time on than we have here.

I still suspect teams will experiment with smaller forward line ups. Geelong loom as a prime candidate should the team’s large number small forwards enter the season with a clean bill of health. Melbourne’s jettisoning of Jack Watts would suggest the club is considering this direction. West Coast could give it a shake too, albeit would be a fundamental change in the way Adam Simpson’s teams have gone about their business over the past in his four years in charge.

The theory of ‘the man’
Team defence is the only kind of defence in today’s AFL. Team attack might be the way of the future. You know what can help trump both of these things? If you’ve got ‘the man’.

The man is Dustin Martin. Patrick Dangerfield. Nat Fyfe. Lance Franklin. Alex Rance. It’s any number of singular entities which can change the game with their individual play, by breaking up the schemes and systems of their opposition. They excel at winning the ball when it is up for grabs. Every player has the capability for brilliance, but the man does it with clockwork regularity.

(Photo by James Elsby/AFL Media/Getty Images)

The man is an important circuit breaker. He can burst from congestion, ball in arm, and create time and space for his team where there wasn’t any before. He can create a scoring opportunity – for himself or a teammate – with a sharp move or incisive delivery of the ball. The man sees the play like everyone else, but has the audacity to try things that seem impossible.

It seems counterintuitive to speak of the role of the individual in an environment where team play is growing more important. Simply, it’s one of the best features of Australian football: that there is so little regulation of what can and can’t happen on the field (in a relative sense) means the game evolves naturally. The code has evolved to prioritise total team play, and one of the natural counters is for the very best players to play in a way that allows them to rise above the rest.

I expect we will see a number of players grow into this kind of role, starting this year. There are candidates across the league. Marcus Bontempelli is practically there already. So is Josh Kelly. Rory Sloane was just about to become the man, until he was tagged into oblivion and his role shifted.

Christian Petracca is in the early stages of becoming the man. Luke Parker could be the man, but Sydney’s midfield is so even at the top. My dark horse pick is Ollie Wines.

There have always been outstanding individual players. And naturally, there always will be. But if this theory is correct, their importance will only grow, and so will their value. We have seen this play out in high profile contract negotiations in recent years: Franklin’s nine-year deal, Dangerfield’s lucrative five-year contract, Fyfe and Martin’s deals from 2017.

More chaos and uncertainty
As the past two seasons have unfolded, the ambiguity of the premiership race has been a throw back to the middle of last decade. Another year of uncertainty looms large. While there are a handful of big picture trends, as ever the individual details and nuances of each team will play a larger role in sort out the 18 teams.

Our group of prospective cellar dwellers is small once more. The mid table is full of intrigue, particularly after Richmond circumvented convention and made it all the way immediately after a disappointing season. Our top weights are mostly unchanged in name, but rocking a new set of silks.

The next ten weeks will help provide some clarity. But if the past two years of football are anything to go by, the AFL will throw up all manner of story lines we won’t see coming.