With six rounds down and 16 to go, let’s take a quick look at the meta-player of the year point totals and standings in the AFL.
Long-time readers know I collect weekly votes from as wide a variety of sources as I can to determine a general consensus for POTY, All Australian teams, best and fairests, and so forth.
Starting with the overall tallies, after six rounds the leaderboard’s top ten looks like this
Some of you know I also track what I call ‘dominant’ and ‘prominent’ game performances. ‘Dominant’ means over 90 per cent of my sources credited that player with recognition for that game (whether that’s a ‘best 22’ league wide, or a ‘three stars’ of the game method or so forth); ‘prominent’ means it’s between 80 tot 90 per cent recognition.
So it’s interesting to note that Dusty’s score includes three dominant games in total (rounds one, two and four), while Tom Mitchell has had four prominent games (rounds one, two, three, and six) where most sources recognised him, but consistently the computerised ones don’t. He’s racking up huge disposal numbers, but the fantasy scorers don’t acknowledge his efforts the way humans do.
It’s also worth noting that Nat Fyfe is indeed back to his Brownlow form and that before a foot injury kept him out of Round 6 (and will keep him out of Round 7 as well), Franklin was a close second place to the defending Brownlow medalist. Not, I should note, the defending ‘meta-player of the year’ – Patrick Dangerfield went back-to-back on our list last season, with Martin a close second.
(Brett Hemmings/AFL Media/Getty Images)
Here are the team-by-team leaders:
(Daniel Carson/AFL Media/Getty Images)
On to a slightly different subject, when we rank teams, we’re generally looking for something beyond what the win-loss ladder shows. In reality the only ‘ranking’ that matters is the one that has Richmond first at 5-1, West Coast second, also at 5-1 with a lower percentage, GWS 4-1-1, and so forth. That is what’s going to determine who makes finals and who doesn’t.
But being humans, we like to think we can forecast the future. (We can’t; we’re only human. Spoiler alert!) However, we all seem to have our own ‘power rankings’, whatever they mean to us, that re-ranks the teams either in paper or in our heads.
You may not indulge in the exercise in writing, but every time you say, “There’s no way Gold Coast can beat the Bulldogs,” despite the win-loss records insisting that the Suns are superior on the ladder to Footscray, you’re indulging in the exercise of power ranking the teams. Congratulations! Welcome to the family!
For amusement, then, I’ve taken the five separate power rankings published on the internet that I follow, all of which use past results and predictive input to forecast coming games with rankings of the 18 AFL teams. They are remarkably consistent, even though they only somewhat follow the current ladder:
| Team | Win-loss | Avg power ranking | Range of rankings | ELO-FF rating | |
| Richmond | 5-1 | 1 | 1.2 | 1st-3rd | 81.0 |
| Sydney | 4-2 | 7 | 2.0 | 1st-3rd | 70.6 |
| Adelaide | 4-2 | 5 | 2.6 | 2nd-3rd | 67.0 |
| GWS | 4-1-1 | 3 | 4.8 | 4th-5th | 63.7 |
| Geelong | 3-3 | 9 | 4.8 | 4th-7th | 63.9 |
| Hawthorn | 4-2 | 4 | 6.6 | 6th-8th | 61.0 |
| West Coast | 5-1 | 2 | 7.0 | 4th-9th | 57.5 |
| Port Adelaide | 4-2 | 6 | 7.5 | 6th-9th | 58.8 |
| Collingwood | 3-3 | 10 | 8.3 | 7th-9th | 58.5 |
| Melbourne | 3-3 | 12 | 10.0 | 10th (all) | 49.5 |
| North Melbourne | 3-3 | 8 | 11.4 | 11th-13th | 47.7 |
| Essendon | 2-4 | 14 | 12.4 | 11th-14th | 38.7 |
| Fremantle | 3-3 | 11 | 13.6 | 12th-15th | 37.2 |
| Western Bulldogs | 2-4 | 15 | 14.0 | 12th-15th | 33.2 |
| St Kilda | 1-4-1 | 16 | 14.2 | 13th-16th | 38.0 |
| Gold Coast | 3-3 | 13 | 16.1 | 13th-18th | 24.3 |
| Carlton | 0-6 | 18 | 17.0 | 16th-18th | 22.2 |
| Brisbane | 0-6 | 17 | 17.1 | 16th-18th | 26.6 |
And I think anyone would be hard-pressed to come up with a list that moved any of those teams more than one ‘grouping’ in any direction. Right now it seems pretty clear that the three teams with the tools and chemistry to expect to be in at least a preliminary final are the three at the top, barring more than one debilitating injury (yes, even the Tigers). Geelong and the Giants are hoping to clear their injury list enough to join those three in the near future – without that, they’re stuck in hoping-for-an-upset mode.
And then there are the next four teams, fighting for three finals spots: West Coast, Port Adelaide, Hawthorn and Collingwood. At the start of the season, that’s almost certainly not the quartet you expected to see there, but at the quarter pole it’s exactly who deserves to be there.
I thought West was in rebuilding mode, Port was in experimental mode, Hawthorn was in transition mode and Collingwood was in, er, Magpie mode, where they continually have promise but flounder until they’re eliminated and then put something together when it’s too late to care.
Turns out I was oh-fer-four on those four-casts.
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Seeing the Demons as such a tight consensus also-ran, tenth-place team both amazes and amuses me. They’re so unpredictable that they’re predictable! We just know they’re going to win some they should lose, lose some they should win, end up about 10-12 or 12-10 and just miss out on the goodies come September. I look at it more optimistically: they are just two teams losing their seasons to injuries or bad form away from finals!
The rest of the league is split into ‘who cares?’ and ‘not again!’ If you’re in either place, I’m sorry, but you’ve got 16 more games of running out the string.
Fortunately, the game of expectations means that there are still targets to shoot for: beating last year’s win totals, for example, (sorry, Bombers), or giving your fans higher expectations for next year.
Fremantle has a new arena to turn into a fortress. Gold Coast and Brisbane have each other to best. The four residents of Etihad are competing to hold service there and develop some indoor dominance. And Essendon – well, sorry, Bombers.
Regardless, we watch the games for the footy, not the results – okay, we care about the results too – and with 54 games down and 153 to go counting finals, there’s plenty of footy to enjoy from here through September! Even if it’s just for bragging rights with your buddy at the pub or your pew-neighbor at church, there’s always a reason to watch!
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