Seven crazy predictions for the final month of the 2018 season

The league has lost its mind, and thus so have I. As our entrée to the run home, here are some crazy, fearless predictions.

On Tuesday, the AFL announced it would trial two of its proposed new rules – the 6-6-6 starting formation at centre bounces and the larger goal square – in an upcoming live VFL game.

Putting aside integrity issues (which shouldn’t really be put aside but this column isn’t about rules and rule changes), this is a development that will allow the league to examine how its ideas may play out in practice. Great.

Some testing is better than no testing; testing for a full season in a lower level league would have been the way to go but when your biggest paymaster comes knocking you better open the door right?

As part of this trial, the AFL revealed how it will police the measure. And this, friends, is where the opening statement of this column is derived. According to The Age:

“Under the trial, the team that has a player outside of their starting position will be penalised with a free kick. In the event that a player from each team is outside the required position then the player deemed furthest away will be penalised”.

That has to be a joke. The league has lost is freaking mind. Anyway, I bring this up for one reason and one reason alone: it’s the pre-text to me also losing my mind as a follower of this league.

There are four rounds to go, 36 games, all of which happen to fall in the month of August. Almost nothing is certain: Richmond and West Coast are all-but locked into the final eight, but teams below them are a bad fortnight away from falling into the top ten of the draft (see Swans, Sydney). Similarly there are a number of teams outside of the eight with grand designs – did somebody say Elimination Final Showdown this weekend – of pushing their way in with four games remaining.

Lance Franklin (Photo by Tony Feder/AFL Media/Getty Images)

The tankapalooza hasn’t really kicked off yet either, which is perhaps a product of the fairly defined tiers of the league this year. With a number of the bottom six teams facing off, and this draft shaping up to be a bumper one, we might see some more early surgeries and positional tweaks before too long.

All Australian chatter is heating up, and the race for many individual awards is as close as it’s been in a while – except the Brownlow which according to the market is all-but a wrap.

The long and the short of it: there is so much up in the air that measured, rational prediction isn’t the go just yet. Instead, here are seven crazy, fearless predictions for the final month of the year.

Patrick Cripps will close in on Tom Mitchell in the Brownlow medal race
According to most markets, Tom Mitchell’s name is already inscribed on this year’s Brownlow medal.

He’s a less than 2/1 proposition, a level which the eventual winner in the past three years have reached at various times. It will be a deserved honour, given he’s going to be the fulcrum on a likely finalist; he is the prototypical modern Brownlow medallist in that he does most of his work under the umpire’s nose.

Tom Mitchell of the Hawks. (Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Media/Getty Images)

It’s done. But the race for second is wide open. Any one of Andrew Gaff, Clayton Oliver, Nat Fyfe (even missing six games through injury), Jack Macrae, Joel Selwood, Shaun Higgins, Dustin Martin, or Patrick Dangerfield could bob up and fill out the quinella. The latter two have had very good and very important seasons, which the umpires will note but which fans and the media seem to have mostly put to one side.

Cripps, though, has been a colossus for his team. He may not reach my lofty prediction of 200 clearances on the season – he’s on track for 160, which is 25 fewer than his 2016 season (in 21 games) – but he’s been as exposed as any inside midfielder in the competition.

Historically, teams have had to have close-to-winning records to have their players edge into Brownlow contention, because umpires have developed a tendency to award three vote performances to the winning side.

However, Cripps is just two votes behind Melbourne ruckman Max Gawn (just as umpires don’t give votes to non-winners, they don’t give votes to ruckmen) in the AFL Coaches Association MVP award, and is level with Tom Mitchell. As the season reaches its end I would expect Cripps to emerge as the clear second place finisher. He will win one one day once the Blues begin their climb up the ladder.

Brodie Grundy will be talked about as an All Australian selection
…and so will Max Gawn. It has been seven years since two ruckmen were selected in the All Australian team, and for good reason. Over time, the dual ruckman approach has all-but become extinct across the league, a trend which has accelerated in the regulated contest era.

The All Australian team has gradually drifted to a place where there are some unwritten rules: the half forward flanks are for midfielders, the bench is for midfielders, small forwards and stopping defenders don’t get selected unless they have been lights out. The lone ruckman selection has similarly become a meme.

Brodie Grundy’s outstanding play is just one reason for Magpies fans to be optimistic. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)

This year, the unwritten rule must be broken. Max Gawn has to be named as the team’s starting ruckman for his dominance at stoppages and his role plugging defensive gaps for the Dees. Gawn has started to believe in the hype being directed his way too, freewheeling with the ball in hand and backing his strength and (relative) agility on the deck.

Then there’s the hit out win percentage (62 per cent, third behind Aaron Sandilands and Nic Naitanui) and the raw number of hit outs to advantage (16.8 per game, number one in the league). It’s a no-brainer.

But as Gawn is a lock to be the number one ruckman so should Collingwood’s Grundy be considered one of the best 22 players in the competition. He’s fourth behind Gawn in hit out win percentage, and takes around 70 ruck contests per game. But more importantly for this conversation, Grundy is in the top 30 for clearances (5.1 per game), top 50 for tackles (5.3 per game) and is averaging 21 disposals and 12 contested possessions per game.

Simply, Grundy is the second best performing ruckman over the course of the season, while also delivering the output of a rotation midfielder for the team sitting third on the ladder. He’s rated as the equal-second best player in the competition (with Dangerfield and Gawn) on the AFL’s Player Ratings system for 2018.

Selection panel memes be damned, Grundy has to be in.

The AFL’s grand plan for Round 23 will come off
HQ has had a bad couple of weeks, for reasons we don’t need to cover again. The release of the Round 23 fixture this week went some way to improving sentiment. After copping a lot of justified criticism, the league’s Round 23 slate looks tantalising.

The Friday night game is likely to see either Essendon make it into the eight or Port Adelaide edge into the top four with a win. If the projections systems are to be believed the Saturday night game between Sydney and Hawthorn (at the SCG) will decide which of the two teams plays in September.

Then on the Sunday the Melbourne-GWS Giants match up will likely shake up the entire first round of the finals series depending on which way it goes.

Capping off the season will be a likely win-and-in game for North Melbourne against St Kilda. North has a fairly meek schedule to come, and will need to make the most of it if they are to deliver on the league’s design – I expect they will.

The ‘Roos will start the game with some uncertainty as to what they need to do to get in, but it will surely be a ‘win by X points’ situation. We had a similar situation last year, with West Coast needing to win by a certain margin to knock Melbourne out and take their place. That looms again.

The only thing HQ could’ve done perhaps would have been to schedule Dees-Giants in a Monday night special – cited as one of the reasons they wanted to introduce the pre-finals by a few years ago – given the influence that game will have on everyone’s finishing positions. Alas, Sunday it is.

A lot can happen in three weeks, but from here the league has nailed that final round fixture.

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The coaching carousel will kick start for the first time in a couple of years
This one is just a hunch. We are living through a period of almost unprecedented coaching certainty, which I’ve written about in the past. Some of the conditions contributing to that – relative parity, steady improvement in some of the lower ranked teams, the introduction of the soft football department spending cap – are perhaps less strong than they were at that time.

Talk has swirled in media circles about coaching discontent in a number of teams: Carlton, GWS, St Kilda and Fremantle come to mind, though none of it appears any more than chatter among journalist types. I expect that talk will heighten as it pertains to coaches of teams who’ve underperformed expectations this year.

Alan Richardson’s position will come squarely into focus. St Kilda plays three of the league’s bottom-of-the-eight aspirants in its run home: Essendon, Hawthorn and North Melbourne. Each will be seeking a percentage boosting win. If the Saints roll over, and end the year with a handful of wins or less, the heat could come quickly.

The media will also talk about Brendon Bolton, unjustifiably, because that’s just what they do. If the Blues were to move on him – a huge mistake, and one they will surely not make – that could lead to some more volatility in the coaching market.

Clubs will also be tripping over themselves to secure Sam Mitchell now that he has signalled his intent to move back to Melbourne in the off season. Alastair Clarkson remains unsigned beyond the 2019 season by the way. Blake Caracella, the so-called mastermind of Richmond’s premiership-winning ball movement scheme, has also been linked to a move away from the Tigers – again, in a media chatter sense rather than anything real and tangible.

There will be at least one, and probably two, changes to the top four
The current top four is Richmond, West Coast, Collingwood and Port Adelaide. The current top four on my strength of schedule-adjusted Pythagorean win ladder is Richmond, Geelong, Melbourne and Hawthorn. The ladder doesn’t reflect which teams have been the best performed over the course of the full season – it never does but this year it is particularly misleading.

Hawthorn is probably a bit too far back to make it into the top four, but then again it plays a fixture amenable to a late season push given it has three eight point games (Essendon, Geelong and Sydney). Geelong could make it in, particularly if it manages to knock off the Tigers this Friday night (cannot wait for this game). Melbourne is perhaps the best team in it, but they are also perhaps the worst team in it, and they have a tough schedule.

Max Gawn of the Demons in action. (Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Media/Getty Images)

The complexion of the ladder will change each and every week as we get closer to those tasty Round 23 games. This weekend alone the three and four seeds could change completely – Collingwood or Port Adelaide could fall out of the eight all together if things broke the wrong way for them.

If I were a betting man, I would expect one of the GWS Giants or Melbourne to end the year inside the top four. The Giants don’t have to worry about their weak percentage because they hold a draw on their balance sheet – they simply have to win three or four of their remaining games, one of which must be its game against the Dees in Round 23.

Similarly, the Dees can win three or four of their remaining games, but have two bites at the eight point cherry (West Coast and GWS).

Sydney controls a lot of what happens from here: they play Collingwood, Melbourne, GWS and Hawthorn. They could play spoiler on each team’s top four ambitions (which would benefit Collingwood) if they get their act together, or could contribute to completely reshaping the eight if they don’t.

There will be non-stop talk about equalisation
Finally, there is no doubt in my mind talk of further measures to equalise the distribution of talent across the competition will arise. We’ve gone through every other off-field topic imaginable at a breathless pace – trade, free agency and the draft will come next.

Whether this is through some restrictions on free agency (which will never happen), changes to the distribution of draft picks (which is more likely to happen but still surely not in play after the Melbourne saga), or fiddles to the finally-pure salary cap system (nope), some balloons are sure to be floated. By the media, and HQ, because that’s just the world we live in now.

Instead, I’ll be firmly focussed on the final 36 games of the season, because as this column implies, there is still so much to work out even as the list of games remaining grows short.