Keep Footy’s Romance. Keep Father/Son

Keep Footy’s Romance. Keep Father/Son

GuyWhoLikesSport

The AFL draft is a convoluted, impossible to follow, let alone decipher, event.

Competitive balance in the AFL, by and large, is a myth.

Some teams are improperly punished or rewarded purely by virtue of the lottery of birth.

The above three statements are all true.

All of them are true, at least in part, because of the father/son rule.

Here’s another true statement: father/son is beautiful and we should keep it in the game.

It seems inevitable that my pleas will fall on deaf ears and the AFL will change the father/son rule to make it even more expensive for clubs to get access to highly rated academy and father/son prospects.

The decision has been made apparently on the basis of preserving competitive balance after transformative players like Sam Darcy and Nick Daicos were offered to the clubs their legendary fathers played for as a matter of priority.

I think this sucks, and I’ll tell you why.

The first reason that father/son should be kept is romance.

There has to be space for romance in sport, especially a sport like ours.

It is special to have a Daicos dynasty at Collingwood.

Peter Daicos played there and is one of Collingwood’s greatest ever players, and now his sons are playing there and playing well.

Father and sons wearing the same strip, bleeding the same colours, makes it even more special.

I barrack for Richmond and I hate Collingwood, absolutely hate them.

I am so bored of Dane Swan telling stories about how he drinks beers while wearing shirts made for people 25 years younger than he is.

I still get fuzzy when I see Peter Daicos lose it in the box when his boys, one wearing his number, win games for their club.

As much as the AFL is trying to become a corporate behemoth like the NFL, it still has retained a little bit of the heart that the NFL jettisoned long ago despite its best efforts.

This is still a bastard amalgam born out of a of suburban league, and the suburban roots are still strong.

Keep the family roots strong as well.

I accept that I’m a romantic, but that romance can’t be the only reason to keep a dinosaur, so let’s look at some facts.

Here’s a fact: competitive balance is a myth.

It’s like Atlantis or non-ironic moustaches on men in their mid-late 20s.

Every league in the world is unbalanced in some way, it’s just the way that competitive sport works. If you aren’t prepared to play every team twice, once at home and once away, then you are going to have a somehow unbalanced league.

Look at the New England Patriots in the NFL.

They won the AFC East 18/20 years during the Brady-Belichick run largely because the other teams in the division were quite poor.

Because of the way the NFL works, that meant that they got a free ticket to the playoffs every year.

That same system lets the occasional 7-9 team into the playoffs. It’s just the way that the sport is structured.

Some years the imbalance will favour you and others it won’t, unless you’re a non-Victorian side playing in a Grand Final but that’s a separate issue.

That’s what professional sport is, beating obstacles.

For non-Victorian teams the obstacle is travel, for Victorian teams it’s never getting true home games because the competing clubs are in neighbouring suburbs.

True competitive balance doesn’t exist anywhere in the world and changing the rules around father/son will not impact that.

You’re just playing whack-a-mole if you make these changes to get to the euphoria of competitive balance.

And if the AFL could see the wood for the trees instead of hunting for the euphoric release that is competitive balance that will please every club they would see that the competition is incredibly balanced.

Other than Sydney, who were 15th in 2019 and 16th in 2020, everyone else is close.

13 teams can reasonably make the finals this season, third and tenth are separated by just two games.

The teams with the second and third highest percentages are sitting tenth and eleventh – Brisbane and the Bulldogs, respectively,

This is an even season.

Beyond this season it’s generally true that teams rise and fall as they are designed to with all the equalisation measures, outside of outliers like North Melbourne.

The equalisation measures that they already have in place are working, even with father/son having been in its current form since 2015.

My final point is that the impact of father/son particularly has been relatively negligible.

The academies, I concede, are a different conversation and they are also caught up in the rule changes (though I would also contend that Errol Gulden and Isaac Heeney being from Sydney is a good thing for the competition).

Here are all of the father/son picks since 2021 and what they cost in terms of draft pick: Sam Darcy (2), Nick Daicos (4),

Jackson Archer (59), Jase Burgoyne (60), Taj Woewodin (65), Will Ashcroft (2), Jaspa Fletcher (12), Max Michalanney (17), Alwyn Davey Jr (45), Jayden Davey (54), Cooper Harvey (56), Osca Ricciardi (32(R)), Jordan Croft (15), Will McCabe (19), Calsher Dear (56), and Kynan Brown (22 (R)).

The best players on that list – Daicos, Darcy and Ashcroft – went picks 2, 4 and 2 in their drafts. That’s expensive!

Daicos and Darcy probably would have gone 1 and 2 in their draft if their clubs didn’t have first rights on them, but they were in the same draft class and went picks 2 and 4.

Pick 1 that year was Jason Horne Francis who is also a gun, and it would have been interesting to see who North picked first if they had a shot at all three.

The biggest bargain is looking like Calsher Dear, who has been really impressive but has only played in seven games so far.

However, if he was more highly touted as a youngster, chances are some other club probably would have bid on him and forced Hawthorn to make a choice.

Since 2015 the biggest bargains have been Josh Daicos (57), Jake Waterman (77), and Rhylee West (26).

That’s a winger who got better when his transcendant brother arrived, a late bloomer key forward who is only a bargain on the basis of his start to 2024, and a clever but capped small forward.

We’re not getting Matthew Richardson for no draft compensation or Jon Brown for pick 30 anymore.

This system is working, good players who are father/sons are expensive but not prohibitively so.

The league is even.

What are we doing here?

I’ll leave you with this. AFL players are pretty close to NBA players in terms of the amount of power that they have with respect to where they go, even when they’re in contract.

The eight years leading up to becoming an unrestricted free agent are one long pre-agency.

The player, if he wants to move, basically has unfettered power to tell his club to trade him somewhere and they always do.

Look at how Jason Horne-Francis, after just one year at North Melbourne, forced his way out of the club that picked him first overall in the “uncompromised” part of the AFL draft.

Do you honestly think that if Nick Daicos was picked by North, he wouldn’t have done the same?

Please don’t ruin the romance of father/son.

 

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