Well that was a whole lot of nuthin’.
Brisbane should improve, Geelong should fall.
Thank god for stats.
I don’t mind a good stat once in a while but that was a little bit much for me. And it didn’t even indicate that we would win the flag, so it must be off the mark.
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Yes you are probably right, but its making it more about us and its not about the saga.
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Funny how you can write massive article write a PhD thesis and come up with essentially the same predictions as Champion Data !
All BS.
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The responses to the article now number 113. The author appears to have given up trying to defend his article.
Not good enough. He should give up trying to write articles.
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I haven’t read the comments but a couple of his main points make sense to me. Tigers, Dees, Pies and WC are better than us and Daniher and Fanta are super important cause neither individually or a combination of McK/Stewart/Brown will see us competitive at the pointy end.
I guess if you take two key significant forwards out of any team they may not look too strong but our two have immediate history in this area. I think we are looking at 5-10.
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West coast are definitively better than essendon as shown by essendon beating them by 5 goals at home.
Happy to swap that win for their flag.
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I’m lid on because I’ve seen too much ■■■■ go down with this club in past years.
Once again, this is a club that has not won a final in more than a decade. I would have said that we were primed to win a final in 2018 and look what happened.
I will admit that this years playing group looks even better than last years and we look primed to break the drought…but things have a tendency to go awry.
I will happily go lid off once we hit 15 wins.
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Hopefully that all changes now no more being mediocre.
From 2017 to 2018 we lost Watson, Stanton, Hocking, Howlett, Bird and Kelly.
The 2018 dropoff was predictable, just by a cursory look at the numbers. 5 guys who’d been part of the same group (midfield) for many many years, plus Kelly who played every game.
From 2018 to 2019 we lost BJ, Colyer and Leueney. Ie 3 guys from 3 separate parts of the ground - only 1 guy who played any significant chunk of gametime.
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Most people would agree that we should have done better last year.
We had some bad luck with injuries. I’m not putting it all down to that, but it’s a thing that happened.
It put us back a year in our expectations, in my opinion.
We should have been top six last year, and as a result we’re talking about top six this year.
In my opinion we should be at least hoping for a bit better than that.
This list is primed.
The gameplan(s) have shown, in isolation not consistently, that we can blitzkrieg and we can strangle teams.
Two first rate KPB’s with very decent back-up.
Great run from the backline.
Francis.
I have really high hopes for Ridley, whether as a backman or linking midfielder.
Shiel, Merrett, Heppell is a damn good trio of A Graders and we have Langford, Parish, Zaka, Myers and rotating forwards to throw in there.
If we can get separation with Daniher and Smack then that’s gonna be ■■■■■■ hard to handle, throw in one of the best small forwards in the comp in Fantasia, Stringer who is a ridiculously difficult match-up, and forward pressure from Baguley and Tippa, oh, and the best tackler in the comp in Smith…
It’s a deep finals list.
Anyone who says it’s not that good has got rocks in their head.
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writes lid off post… leaves out McGrath.
Poor form Wimm.
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That stats article did read like a bit of an application to become a writer for fivethirtyeight. Spoiler alert - application rejected.
There were only two good metrics in there. The first was the “you lose a bunch of close ones = you should go up next year” - I generally agree with this.
The second more interesting metric is the games experience one, which has us at 14th in the league (2500 odd games exp) The writer contends that flags in the AFL are won with teams that have <3000 games experience (offers no proof but it sounds right). 8 teams this year fit that bill, but not us.
That’s my one big concern about this year. We are still pretty inexperienced. The talent is there but perhaps top 4 and ultimate success may have to wait a year or two? I don’t know.
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So to boil that down a little -“if you take away the best players from any team in the comp, they won’t do so well against the top sides”.
Yep, understood.
Very happy to be corrected that the list is better than I said.
If McGrath can step up the way Deckham has said he will (and I put a lot of faith in what people see at training, having seen Carlisle and Zerrett show heaps before the season has started on the few occasions I’ve been myself), then we’re going to be even more potent.
If I was in the lid off thread, I would suggest that this provides the opportunity to steal one early, and set up a dynasty.
But I’m not… so I won’t.
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Look I hope you’re right! And I backed us to win the flag. But if we win it this year we will be the least experienced team to win it for quite some time I think.