The school of Craig McRae

The school of Craig McRae

GuyWhoLikesSport

If you gave Pies fans the choice between having dinner with Jesus Christ, Taylor Swift, or Craig McRae, how quickly would they answer Craig McRae?

15 seconds?

Maybe less.

That’s the hold that the man has over one of the biggest fanbases in Australia.

In a sport where everyone is forever angry at their coach, McRae is beyond reproach.

But by all accounts, McRae is not an X’s and O’s man. He’s all about the Jimmy’s and the Joe’s. Michael Voss also isn’t a gameplan-heavy coach. Nor is Damien Hardwick. All these men outsource the finer details of game planning.

McRae’s consigliere is Justin Leppitsch, as he was Hardwick’s for a time. Voss shops the game plan out to Ashley Hansen.

Brain drain is inevitable after success and it has become clear, after Leppitsch left the Tigers in 2020, that Richmond losing his tactical nous was a significant factor in their recent decline.

But if these men outsource game-planning, at least to a degree, what do they do? They present well, they organise, they communicate, and they delegate. They accept that the head coach of an AFL team is too big of a job for any one person to do on their own in the modern era, and they act accordingly.

More than anything, though, they motivate.

Craig McRae drives the Pies to be better men, and by extension, better players. Tom Mitchell said as much after the game on Saturday parroting a McRae-ism that “happy players produce the best results”.

He motivates players to run and chase and harry defensively when they’re trying to lock a game down and swarm forward in droves when they’re trying to jag a win from the depths of defeat. He empowers them to take the tough kick in the corridor when it’s there. He tells them they can be better players than they ever thought they would be.

That is the McRae superpower, and it almost appears to be a blueprint.

Look at the way the Bulldogs concentrated power in Luke Beveredge’s hands and look at how that’s gone. Now they’re trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube and it is impossible to know how successful they will be.

Lyon and Clarkson are also trying to return to their own halcyon days, but the ultimate success of that approach is still to be determined.

But why has footy moved in the direction it has?

I think, like anything, it comes down to the way the game is played today. Footy today is so much about momentum and pressure. It’s become a game where effort is a precious commodity.

If you put Saturday’s game on TV in 2013 while Hawthorn was picking teams apart by foot, you would have said that it was a different sport. And in a lot of ways it is.

In 2013, Sydney led footy in rebound 50 rate with 72.6. Now, 10 years later that would have been 16th in the same category. In 2013, Geelong led footy in meters gained with basically 6,000. In 2023 that would have been 7th. In 2013, Sydney led footy in pressure acts with 297. In 2023, that would have been 13th.

These are all run-and-effort statistics. Watching footy now compared to just a decade ago is like watching The Wolf of Wall Street after having just come out of Casablanca. Today’s game looks like it’s had 15 coffees (or coffee substitutes), and as a result, you need to coach effort to win in the modern game.

Craig McRae has mastered coaching effort.

 

It reminds me a lot of a college football coach. The most valuable commodity in college football is not the genius coordinator, it’s the motivator who can keep his roster stacked with future NFL players motivated to play Middle Tennessee but can also get them up for a national championship in Georgia.

Naturally in college, you need to be able to recruit and do a number of other things, but the most successful college coaches at big schools in the recent past don’t necessarily call plays on either side of the ball. They hire coordinators to drive the Ferrari on the field and they do the other things.

But when it’s time to get in front of the team and get them to play hard, that’s where they are at their best.

Footy is going in that direction as the game moves farther toward the helter-skelter game which makes for consistently great watching.

None of this article means to diminish the talent of players like Daicos, De Goey, Pendlebury, Sidebottom, Moore etc.

 

No amount of effort can get Beau McCreery to have the presence and skill to execute the handball in mid-air that Daicos was able to get to De Goey when the game was at its hottest.

But it is a big part of the puzzle.