What if it’s a 56-47 dower contest and no forward is particularly good?
What if it’s a 110-100 shootout and no defender is particularly good?
I can’t actually think of a game where no midfielder is particularly good. There’s always a standout mid.
The whole thing with the Brownlow is the historic prestige and ceremony, not how accurately it reflects the best player. Leigh Matthews, Wayne Carey, and Gary Ablett Sr never won one and they are routinely argued to be the top three of the last 50 years.
Midfielder will get 3 votes every time.
So you’ll get Daicos and Cripps getting votes in the 30s.
It’ll still end up skewed even though the intention is there.
Then you’ll get the ‘All Australian’ affect where midfielders resting forward would get votes ahead of forwards. Same deal with defenders.
Unfortunately, it’s a midfielders game now. That’s where games are won and lost.
I’m not saying it should be applied retrospectively, but the Brownlow isn’t what it used to be where non midfielders stood a chance. Umpires only look at stats and even then there are obviously favourites among the padders.
Maybe I just struggle with guys like Cripps and Neale standing a realistic shot at winning 3 brownlows
I think the fact that players like Cripps get votes even when they have low stats indicates the umpires don’t actually look at the stats. In fact I’m pretty sure they are not allowed to look at any stats before casting their votes. Maybe if they could then it may lead to better informed choices rather than fixating on the guys who are around every pack & assuming they were the best players.
That was quite some time ago.
Every award is a midfielders award. That’s where all the best players are and where all the action is.
Even when we had 100 goal kickers every year, they barely got close to top 10.
Greats like Carey and Franklin have barely made it close to the top five let alone the winner.
Umpires don’t ‘just look at stats’. Because apparently, they don’t get the stats.
Taking away a bias, they are fantastic players.
Daicos will win a handful of Brownlow’s easily because he’s so easily recognisable.
No matter what they do, it won’t be ‘fair’. There will always be a skew toward midfielders.
I would swear that they started getting stats to minimise that about 25 years ago.
Stats are pretty meaningless these days.
I think the clear problem is that the umpires are sucked in to the media hype around name players. We see it in the way they officiate the game, and we see it in the way they award votes.
I thought so too. So not sure when the stats were taken away from them before giving votes. There was probably concerns about it skewing what they experienced.
They get a completely different perspective to what you see from the grand stand or on tv.
And they wouldn’t necessarily know the ‘team tactics’ side of things unless it affects the way they umpire.
I don’t think there’ll be an answer to the problem.
It’s a midfielders game.
They get the majority of votes. They win a high majority of awards. They even get a good percentage of the All Australian team.
I’d hazard a guess that from the top 10 of the Brownlow, it’ll reflect 80% of coaches award and players MVP award. The numbers would be different, but the rankings would be generally the same.
Coaches award is a different voting (5-4-3-2-1) and the MVP is each team selects three from their own team as ‘nominations’ then the players vote (3-2-1).
I’d say the MVP would be heavily skewed towards midfielders and eliminate a large percentage of forwards and backs.
No doubt about it. The issue is not so much that votes go to midfielders, it’s that they just go to a single midfielder from each team, completely obscuring the fact that midfields are more than 1 person deep.
well this is it, isn’t it. we can all go on about how ____ award is actually the best one, but 1.5m are still going to watch the brownlow count in 2025
my working theory about the vote “inflation” or whatever we’re calling it is that we now have four umpires deciding the votes instead of two (?) in the 90s. shouldn’t need any further explanation for anyone who has ever been on a committee.
It is.
But looking at the favourites midfields…
Cripps, Hewett, Walsh, Cerra. Cripps played every game for memory. The others missed a handful (Cerra half the season).
Daicos, Pendelbury, De Goey, Tom Mitchell. Daicos played every game. Pendles is past it and missed a handful, De Goey missed half the year ad Mitchell out for the entire year.
Bont, Treloar, Libba, Richards. Bont, Treloar and Richards played every game. Libba missed a handful of games.
I’d say Cripps stands out from his midfield. Ditto Daicos. Bont had more around him to take votes even though he’s usually the centre point of their whole midfield.
I hate the high scores too. They’ve been trending far too high since Greg Williams broke the 30 vote barrier. But it’s showing that there’s more midfielders in the game now than before at the same time as it’s still centred heavily towards one gamebreaking midfielder.
I don’t think we’re seeing a Judd, Cousins & Kerr midfield with support midfielders after that. It’s more likely 2 (or 1) with support players after that.
It cant continue at whatever the current system is, a glaring example is cripps 19 disposal, 18 percent disposal efficiency game against us, horrible game by his standards but earns him 2nd best on ground. No reasonable person could have him anywhere near the votes, yet players like merrett dont pick up votes for great games. Their is a star bias , this isnt an attack on cripps, but him a daicos got so many votes that werent deserved and the lesser knowns that performed much better on the night get no recognition.
The system must change, seeing the stats could worsen this situation as they see daicos having high numbers even though 10 - 15 of them were kickouts then handing him another 3 votes, umps arent clever enough to deep dive into those stats and see his efficency was 40 percent, he didnt lay tackles and so on.
IMO they need to make the brownlow a background award, make the mvp or coaches votes the glitzy night and the most prized one. ( although macrae giving daicos 5 votes every week to make sure hes at the top is a problem )
Either way the brownlow is at a perilous stage in terms of public perception and something must change.