Breath it in, AFL fans – the bye rounds are over. From now on it’s nothing but sweet, fully fledged footy. Oh, and of course – hot takes.

How about another extension for Nathan Buckley?
I wavered back and forth on whether or not Nathan Buckley should get a contract extension last year, and ultimately was a little surprised to see he did – but one can’t fault the decision now.

There are two things in particular that impress me most about Collingwood this year.

The first is that injuries have been no real excuse. No Darcy Moore? No Alex Fasolo? No Jamie Elliott? I would’ve said at the start of the year that they’d be a bottom four side without those players.

Instead after today’s win they are in a group of four at the other end of the ladder. The arrival of Jaidyn Stephenson and the improvement of Will Hoskin-Elliott have rejigged a forward line that is now deceptively dangerous.

The second is that, more than any of this year’s other rising teams, it’s clear they believe they can beat anyone, anywhere, anytime.

When they’re going poorly a club like Collingwood cops it all the more because of being one of the bigger teams in the league – but when they start to build momentum, that size makes them hard to stop.

There’s a lot more nice things that could be said about Collingwood, and you’ll probably hear me say some of them sooner or later.

For now though I think this sums it up – Nathan Buckley deserves another contract extension. He’s signed up till the end of 2019 right now, but I’d wager that won’t remain the case a whole lot longer.

Evidently the answer to the question of how to make Collingwood a finals side again was right there under his nose the whole time: just grow a beard.

A prediction: percentage will decide who makes finals
Things are pretty tight in the race for the top eight right now. There’s nine teams who could all make a very strong argument that they deserve to be playing footy in September.

Richmond, Sydney and West Coast look likely to finish in the top four this year, and at the moment Port Adelaide and Collingwood are each a win ahead of the pack looking to join them there.

After that we’ve got Melbourne, Geelong, North and Hawthorn all tied on eight wins each (and five losses), separated only by percentage.

You would have to be a halfway decent AFL team to have an 8-5 record and percentage of 115, as Hawthorn currently do. So they must be disappointed to not be in the top eight.

Unfortunately, that’s the reality of things: at least one of those nine teams is going to miss out on playing finals.

It’s really quite hard to tip who – though I reckon both Hawthorn and North Melbourne missed the chance to gain valuable percentage this weekend (though the last-gasp win on Saturday night was still pretty fun).

Whoever it is though, I’m going out on a limb and saying that like Melbourne last year, they will miss out not by wins but by percentage – and it could once again be a very small margin.

If that happens two years in a row, I reckon it will strengthen the AFL’s argument in favour of a ‘wildcard weekend’ before finals.

We AFL fans don’t tend to be overly fond of change as a group, but now that we’re getting to the point where the league is reasonably well balanced with 18 teams, it’s worth considering.

Basically in place of the pre-finals bye we’d have seventh vs tenth and eighth vs ninth in elimination finals (top six still have a bye), the winners going on to take the usual role of seventh and eighth in an otherwise unchanged finals set up.

End result is that all nine of the teams we’ve talked about (and one more) get to play finals footy, and we have slightly more finals footy to watch, and no bye round. Hard to see a negative.

Cameron’s dumb act will cost the Giants their season
They came home from Brisbane with the four points but I’m willing to put a fork in the GWS Giants’ 2018 season and say it’s done, and it ended the moment Jeremy Cameron knocked out Harris Andrews.

Cameron got Andrews with high contact and high impact – that’ll be sent straight to the tribunal you’d assume, and I can’t see it getting anything less than a four-week ban.

Who do the Giants have in the next four weeks? It doesn’t make for pretty reading: Hawthorn, West Coast, Richmond and Port Adelaide.

They might’ve started favourites in one of those four games at best (the Hawks at Spotless), but with Cameron out it’s hard to see them being competitive in any of them.

Four losses would see them slump to a 7-9-1 record and from that position and essentially needing to win every game left in the season to have chance at finals.

Can’t see it happening.

Of course it wouldn’t be fair to pretend this has been an otherwise successful season for the Giants and ruined by this incident – instead it’s more like another nail in the coffin.

Simply put, GWS’ repeated injury woes have just been too great for one of their best players to be putting himself on the bench with a dumb act like this.

Get smarter, Jeremy.

The Bombers are our most likely finals bolter
We’ve talked the nine teams who are elbow-deep in the finals race. We’ve talked the Giants, who aren’t. And the Crows aren’t either. But if there’s anyone who can bust it open from here, it’s the Bombers.

On Thursday night they did exactly what every visiting team dreams of doing and gave a vocal home crowd plenty of reason to go quiet.

Six goals to none in the first term and eight to one by halftime was as brilliant a start as you could ask for and, if anything, the Dons should almost be disappointed to have only won by 28 points in the end.

West Coast had fifteen scoring shots to eight in the second half but their inaccuracy prevented them from getting anywhere near the lead.

It’s hard to say how much we should factor the absence of Jack Darling and Josh J Kennedy into the result. In their place Fraser McInnes and Scott Lycett kicked a lacklustre zero goals, five behinds.

However Essendon’s dominance in the first quarter, in particular, would’ve made it hard for even a fully fit Eagles side to compete.

Here’s Essendon’s problem: a poor start to the year has got them a whole two wins behind the pack, with nine matches left to make up the difference.

Six of those nine matches are against teams already in the top half of the ladder. That’s both good and bad – it means it’s a challenging mix, but it also gives them the opportunity to personally take their rivals down a peg.

Personally I suspect they’ve probably left their run too late it’s just too much ground to left to make up in the finish to the season.

But if there’s a team outside the current top nine who can do it, I reckon it’d be them.

The problem with Mitch Wallis
It’s been interesting this year to see that Mitch Wallis has become something of a talking point through a combination of not being a lock in the Bulldogs’ 22, and happening to be a free agent come the end of the year.

Wallis has played nine of the 13 games for the year, and Saturday night’s match was his second since being called back into the team after a three-week VFL stint.

It wasn’t the worst performance on the stats sheet, with 25 touches, a goal, a goal assist, five clearances – though only two tackles is a bit meh.

Unfortunately for Mitch Wallis, it’ll be remembered largely for this kick out of bounds on the full while driving forward in the last minute which allowed North to take possession and kick the match-winning goal.

The thing about Mitch Wallis, and one of the main reasons he hasn’t stayed in the side, is that this isn’t out of character. Don’t get me wrong – he’s a hard worker, I like him. But he’s only a solid footballer and definitely not a good kick.

He had his best season in 2015, his first year under Luke Beveridge, before a horrific broken leg saw him miss out on the 2016 flag.

Essendon and Brisbane are the clubs interested in signing him according to the rumour mill but – with all due respect to Mitch, who is a perfectly fine AFL player – I don’t think either should rush into anything.

Luke Beveridge is known for his love of versatility and really that makes it no surprise that Wallis hasn’t been a lock in the side for him, because he doesn’t have much of it.

I imagine Wallis, being a father-son pick, would probably rather stay at the Dogs – I reckon he’d only be looking at his options if he feels that the coach doesn’t really want him around anymore. And I think Luke Dahlhaus, another unrestricted free agent at the Dogs, remains unsigned for simillar reasons. Just my hunch, so probably take it with a grain of salt.

Like first-year uni students, AFL clubs love a freebie, so it’s no surprise that sides like Essendon and Brisbane are sniffing around. But they’d be wise to remember the old saying ‘you are what you eat’.

In the end, an AFL team will possess the attributes it drafts into it. If you pick up average players, average is what you will be. Something for every club to think on before they get too spendy at the trade table this year.

For better or worse, Blues will go back to the well
The past week has seen plenty of talk about just how Carlton are managing their list.

After a disappointing loss last week, the club came out and made it clear they are targetting mature talent at the end of the year, throwing up names like Andrew Gaff and Jeremy McGovern.

Well… yeah right. No. Surely the club know that’s not going to happen, the neutrals know that’s not going to happen, and you’d hope the fans know that’s not going to happen. Gaff and the Gov certainly do.

There’s been talk, too, about Marc Murphy. Yes, the Blues should do everything they can to convince him to stay – but he’s an unrestricted free agent. He’ll leave if he wants to.

From the sounds of it, Melbourne are a bit keen on him – but so might be Geelong, Essendon or North. Watch this space I suppose.

There has been talk that with Murphy going the AFL might be very nice and hand Carlton a high draft pick as compensation to help them out a little.

Unless he’s being paid extremely well – and he won’t be – then the magic formula shouldn’t logically spit out anything higher than a second-round pick.

But that could very easily be pick 20 this year, and very handy for Carlton, given they already traded away their 2018 second-rounder as part of the Gibbs deal.

Then of course there was rumour that seems much more realistic – the Blues are reportedly interested in Gold Coast duo Jack Scrimshaw and Will Brodie, probably figuring that if they’ve taken all of GWS’ depth they may as well start on Gold Coast’s.

Good talents both of them but it will be hard to make a trade happen if they do indeed want to come to the Blues. Pick 1 is certainly too much, pick 20 certainly too little. And they happened to both be contracted until the end of 2020 – so who knows how that’ll work out.

With it being unlikely that the Blues will land any major senior players form other clubs this year, in the end the most concrete news of the week was also the best – Charlie Curnow signing on for the long term. Curnow, all going well, will be one of the pillars this club is built around in five years’ time.

The week ended with a somewhat respectable 20-point loss to Collingwood, where the Blues seemed to do exactly what I asked of them last week – find their identity, in this case a defensive team who might not win, but can do themselves proud.

Not a bad week in the end.

Quick and nasty
– We seem to have all agreed that while Brisbane are a 1-12 side, they’re a pretty good 1-12 side. That’s fair enough but to be honest I’m still disappointed that they only have one win for the year. Just win some games, Brisbane. I’d really like to see that.

– How hard could it be to ensure that the six teams returning from the bye all play each other the following week? The AFL has been happy to accommodate Richmond, Melbourne, Essendon and Collingwood like this when it comes to the week after Anzac Day, so why not the rest of us?

– ‘Play Majak Daw in defence’ seemed like a terrible idea to me in the preseason but I’m really quite glad to have proven wrong. He’s playing a highly specialised role so who knows how long it’ll last, but for now, he’s doing quite well.

– Jack Darling and Josh J Kennedy’s injuries might well cost West Coast a top-two spot this year – but if that means they get an extra game or two at the MCG on the way to trying to make a grand final, it could allow them to build confidence at the ground and even be a positive.

– As a North fan it warms my heart to see Lindsay Thomas getting games for Port Adelaide, and kicking vital goals while he’s at it. Go well, LT.