And yet dodoro era was so dar the industry average for all australians? He got 20 years at the helm.
Zero Hanger article reads like it used chatGPT to summarise this thread.
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Yeah true it does but their points from those guys are still good. Lyndsay and NHH are pretty logical choices for us.
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I take your point but I’ll ask you a question. If the recruitment team has a put 2 years of planning into who they believe they need to help get the club competing and those players they are targeting will be gone by pick 6 and there are only 2 games you can win for the rest of the year do you bin their plans and ask them to go back to the drawing board so you can beat the tigers and Carlton?
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For some recruits, it’s the thrill of the chase. Climbing the mountain to get on an AFL list is the only thing that matters to them. I recently spoke to a retired AFL footballer who stated some of his mates went off the boil after a time in the AFL because it was all too hard, training, injuries, public opinion, media etc. The hard nosed ones keep going. The ones who achieved the goal of playing AFL, that was enough for them.
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You’re stacking three ifs on top of each other there.
Short answer is no. If that’s what your recruiters are telling you, frankly you need to sack them and get better recruiters. Saying that only a specific couple of kids in the whole country can fix your side is also loser talk. Getting hypnotised by the sexy high picks and falling into despair over getting pick 7 rather than pick 5 is the stuff of online pundits, not successful profession list builders. Good recruiters know that depth matters and that you can find quality anywhere in the draft if you’re good enough. Geelong admittedly benefit from the Cotton On subsidy when it comes to attracting trades/free agents, but they’ve regenerated their list continually and successfully over the past 20 years and have been in the top 8 pretty much that entire time. I don’t think they’ve even had a pick above 7 since, what, Selwood in 2006?
I spent a lot of time in the 2008-16 years watching junior footy, going to games in person and freezing my arse off before much if any footage was available online. I wrote up a lot of player profiles and match reviews, was contacted by club recruiters a few times for my opinion, and so on. More to the point, I was doing this long enough ago that lots of the kids I profiled have now gone through their entire footy career into retirement, so I can look back and evaluate my own impressions and predictions at the time vs the way things actually panned out. The big thing that I learned was - don’t get caught up in the hype. Every year when the draft starts coming around (or once it becomes clear that the season is another writeoff) names of top end kids start getting bandied about and everyone grabs hold of their next saviour like a drowning man.
Here’s an experiment - go back in the blitz draft/trade threads a few years. I guarantee that every year there’s been someone suggesting we package our future first to jump up one or two places or get another high pick in the upcoming draft because they’ve latched all their hopes on getting one specific kid. Everyone always gets hypnotised by the new hotness, because draftees are hope, and haven’t had the chance yet to disappoint you because you probably haven’t seen them play enough.
I could feel off a list of names longer than your arm about blokes from the last decade who I was burning in hope we’d draft - and who then went on to do not much. I remember the Bryce Gibbs cup, and how Gibbs was going to singlehandedly drag whoever drafted him to a golden age. I’ve watched these enormously hyped guys come and go, and most often vanish without a ripple, much less a flag.
Over the years I’ve increasingly come to believe that drafting is overrated, and that development is king. I mean, Heppell and McGrath both won Rising Stars, and Cox would have if it wasn’t for injury. We have been getting talent through the door. But we have for decades not managed to translate that raw talent into long-term success, while clubs like Geelong have kept trucking along. Coaches talk about ‘not having the cattle’ and it always bugs me. You’re the farmer, guy, and you have a new bunch of calves every year. Feed them properly ffs.
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Awesome points you’ve made there
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66% failure rate is pretty rough
Getting a pick right is pretty arbitrarily. If you pick a guy at pick 80 and he plays 40 games did you get that pick right? Or McGrath, if he plays 250 + games did you get that pick right? That’s not even counting injuries.
It’s a rough business, but the history is pretty unambiguous. I mean, pick 1 should be the easiest pick in the draft to nail, right? How many times has pick 1 with hindsight turned out to be the best player in the draft? You can probably make the argument for a couple, at best, and mostly from the early 00s - Riewoldt and hodge and the like. How many times has pick 1 not turned out to be in the top 10 players from the draft? I can think of plenty.
100% right. It’s an unknowable. Was he played out of position, did the coaching staff have the wrong personalities to teach him effectively or did the push a dud game plan which didn’t let him perform, did the fitness staff fail to put muscle on him, did the medical staff get him chronically injured?
Footy is a team sport off the field as well as on. I think it’s very easy to over-focus on drafting (or trading) as the sole locus of success. I think most of the time what happens once a player is at the club has much more impact than small sliding doors moments about who the players are.
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Apart from development, I just disagree with this. History has shown time and again that the vast majority of the talent on premiership squads comes through the national draft. Yes alternative pathways are a source that should be invested in and they’ve become more important in recent times, but even now the vast majority still comes through the national draft.
I agree with your point that any individual pick is extremely unlikely to make the difference. You build a list through quality and quantity of picks across multiple drafts. You need elite players, and good foot soldiers. You’re statistically more likely to draft elite players at the point end of the draft. The difference between pick 4 and 6 might not be huge, but the difference between 4 and 12 is more significant. One of the factors that’s been limiting our development (among many others) has been continually finishing 9th to 12th on the ladder.
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Yeap. Any win by us or Melbourne this year will be a setback. None of this culture bullshit. We dont have any while finishing 9-12th anyways. We need elite top 5 talent coming in
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Is this actually true? Just looking at Brisbane their top level players in their premiership were mostly brought in outside the draft. They do have some top draft picks that definitely have come good but I wouldn’t say the club are any better than anyone else in this regard.
Has the counter helped us at all? It hasn’t. Just allowed us to finish 8-12th
Even the guys they traded in like Neale, Daniher and Dunkley were picked in the national draft. There aren’t that many on the Bris list that weren’t national draft picks.
Outside of free agent acquisitions your picks are also the currency you use to bring in talent in trades.
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I’d argue that’s not true. You largely bring in talent these days by convincing the talent to want to come to you. After that, a trade will be managed 90% of the time, the club losing its player will have fairly minimal say in the matter. Certainly the difference between pick 4 and pick 7 will make no difference at all.
And yes, I know there’s times when trades have fallen over, our Dunkley offer for example. But that was over the NUMBER of first round picks being offered, not the position of the picks in the mid top 10. And that’s kinda what I was arguing in the first place, that it isn’t worth tanking to sneak up a couple of spots on the draft board.
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I don’t think anyone was arguing against having blokes on the list that were EVER picked in the draft.
I was arguing that a small difference in draft position at the top end isn’t going to make much of a difference worth a damn to your outcomes, and isn’t worth tanking or barracking for losses over. Also, that all the top picks in the world won’t do you any good if the rest of your process isn’t up to scratch, or Carlton and Norf would have split the last decade’s flags between them. Also, that the draft these days is so wildly comprised by academy and father-son picks that you absolutely need to be sourcing talent from these pathways or you will lose ground.
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I like this conversation, have discussed it a bunch and always open to hearing other opinions on it that differ from mine.
There are three forms of currency for assembling a list. List spots, cap space, and draft picks. Of those three draft picks are by far the most important. They’re the currency you use to acquire the majority of your players directly, and they’re the currency you use to trade players into list spots and cap space. Cap space and list spot management to open up free agency and SSP options are becoming more important but they’re still a long way behind draft picks in the hierarchy.
You say that a small difference in draft picks is not worth tanking for… but then that becomes a very subjective and nuanced argument. What do you mean by tanking exactly? And what’s the line there… if its the difference between 4 and 6 its not worth “tanking” but if its the difference between 4 and 12 it is? Is it tanking to pick Tsatas over Dylan Shiel, knowing that it probably results in us being less likely to win a game… especially when you extend those types of decisions to 4 or 5 youngsters picked in preference to old stagers? I don’t think anyone here is suggesting that we literally tell our players to go out and lose, but there are what I would consider to by wise choices here that are tinkering a little around the edges - developing our young talent while also avoiding pointless wins at the end of the season when we’re already out of the finals race.
That might not have been what you were intending to say, but you did say this, which is what I was originally responding to:
I would argue the way you build a good list now is essentially the same its been since the advent of the draft. You invest in your recruitment team, acquire a core group of young talent in a similar age bracket through maximising the picks you have, then look to complement that core group through alternative talent acquisition pathways like free agency, trading, getting lucky with SSP’s and rookie picks etc. But the core of any list build is through the national draft.
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Yep agree with this - I remember Brad Scott talking about certain clubs that are always down the bottom of the ladder till they get what they want then they come up again (ie tanking)