Left Essendon - Alex Morgan

Honestly not 100% sure. AFL contracts finish on October 31, but final list lodgement isn’t until November 29. The CBA says

No Player shall be delisted from the List of an AFL Club from the period immediately
following the Pre-Season Draft until 31 October the following year without the consent
of the AFL General Counsel.

The implication to me is that they can be delisted any time up to the PSD, which would mean they could be uncontracted but not yet delisted between November 1 and November 27 (PSD date). And in fact that no player has been officially delisted until today.

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I’m more than a little ■■■■■■ at this. Why couldn’t this have happened during the trade window and got us a pick in the 50s?

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Spot on

Swinging for the fence on two consecutive picks is reckless drafting .

Thread has a surprising amount of classless snarky comments directed at a 0 gamer who most agree has shown very little. Just fare the kid well and spare us the the completely cringe-worthy scorn.

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I’m not sure if this is sarcasm or not. We got Jimmy Stewart for pick 77. There is no way we’d get a pick below that for Morgan.

because he’s not worth a pick anywhere near the 50’s

Big M. Little organ

Maybe we didn’t offer him a contract till after the trade period.

I’m not disagreeing there, just noting that this is Dodoro’s stated philosophy. I’ve watched with a large degree of annoyance as we’ve waved blokes like Parker and Mathieson through while they were sitting there absolutely begging for us to snaffle them, while drafting flashy longshots in their place.

I just hope there’s some sort of review process, where the club goes back a few years after the fact and analyses the decisionmaking process. “Why did we pick guy X who ended up a bust, what factors led to us overlooking guy Y who turned out to be a gun, and what do we learn from this?”

Cos frankly by far our most successful 2nd round pick in recent memory was Zerrett, who we actually abandoned the ‘2nd rounders swing for the fences’ principle with and took a relatively safe option because we had no first rounders that year.

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I agree with most of what you are saying but in no way was Merrett a safe pick.

A short, average paced guy with a cricketing background was not bankable.

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That’s one comment he made without a lot of context to it, that people have run with as an indisputable fact about every selection he makes. You should be careful extrapolating definitive conclusions from a small sample of evidence. Incidentally I think “upside picks” was the term he used in that video.

He may have been referring to that particular draft, it may have been every draft. He may have simply meant that at that point in the draft there’s usually players available with lots of talent, but flaws that see them fall out of the top picks.

There’s a lot more discussion about someone who’s never done anything than I expected.

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I saw a fair bit of u18s that year, and IMHO he was a safe pick (though i had him pegged more as a hff like Jerrett). There was a bracket with him, Dumont, Taylor, and a couple of others in the early 20s that you could reasonably rely on to be solid. A swing for the fences pick that year would have been someone like, well, Fantasia. Or Dayle Garlett. Or Lobb. or Cutler.

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GWS had (something of) a list and cap squeeze so wanted him out. We are happy to retain Morgan.

I think it’s apt to point out that we now only have one player of Indian descent on our list now. We used to be the afl leader in this.

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Yeah, fair enough.

I would have thought considering our history with talls that Lobb would have been the safe pick in that instance.

I’d have to disagree there, he was quite clearly talking about a general philosophy. First rounders for sure thing, second rounders for upside picks, third rounder and later for filling gaps. And going back the only obvious (and non-compromised) draft where he’s gone against the ‘2nd rounder for upside/swing for fences/whatever’ strategy was when we took Ashby in 2012…

I disagree with the philosophy (and I’d argue that it hasn’t served us all that well, in non-compromised years we’ve probably done better out of third and fourth rounders than second rounders), but we’ve stuck to it pretty consistently.

Lobb had a fair bit less exposed form if i remember right. Don’t think he played u18 champs from memory. He was a late bolter.

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My personal thoughts are that that we have s top four list and from as early as next season we will be challenging for a premiership.

Dodoro has been able to achieve our current list off the back of two expansion clubs and a saga threat nearly crippled our club.

Whatever the philosophy is it is clearly working.

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