Brad Scott’s Cautionary Tale

Brad Scott’s Cautionary Tale

GuyWhoLikesSport

David Barham came under fire at the start of this season for extending Brad Scott’s contract until 2027.

That  felt like an acknowledgement of what I wrote in the preseason – Brad Scott is just now starting on the footy.

In a sense, Brad Scott did a Star Wars and started at Part 4.

In his first two years in charge, Scott essentially kept much of the on-field infrastructure around while he fought the various internal viruses that Essendon loves to have around like they’re Jame Eagan loving the recalcitrant Helly R.

Those two viruses, who actively hated Scott, were named Kevin Sheedy and Adrian Dodoro.

They’re out now.

Scott remade the footy department while Barham remade the Board into a club that is meant to be united behind Scott.

Now that that’s done, Scott has turned to the footy.

Scott shaved a full half-year off the list’s average age in one season with the departures of Dyson Heppell, Nick Hind,Jake Stringer, and Jake Kelly.

They’re not superstars, but they were four of Essendon’s six oldest players last year.

What does that mean?

Remember in the Pursuit of Happyness where at the start Will Smith has a house but doesn’t have any money and is painting his house instead of paying rent?

Things were bad but they weren’t that bad.

That was Scott’s first two years in charge where he won 11 games in each.

With the cuts to experience and the overwhelming lack of talent, we’re in the Will Smith being chased by the IRS into homelessness portion of the Brad Scott era.

That’s where are now: a complete teardown of the whole club.

It’s not dissimilar to Richmond’s teardown, other than that Essendon had fewer notable players to lose in the first place.

Indeed, Essendon has actually fielded a younger team than Richmond.

The question for Essendon is whether they’ll get the triumphant scene at the end where they get told they should get another shirt for the next day.

To answer that, consider the context.

A constant for Brad Scott is his desire to be either competing or abjectly terrible. Between 2010 and 2018, Scott’s Roos won 10 or more games in all bar one season and made preliminary finals in 2015 and 2016.

After a 2018 season where they won 12 games, Scott had clearly had enough of being at or near the finals without a chance of winning the flag so he decided to dump 13 players including Jarrad Waite. In the previous two off-seasons, other pillars like Boomer Harvey, Andrew Swallow, Lindsay Thomas, and Drew Petrie all left.

Over a three-year period, Scott burned it down and figured they could rebuild the house out of kids with little experience around them and coaching.

In theory it sounds like a good idea, but a fact of football is that you need adults on the field so the kids can be protected from the rigours of the AFL game.

Ironically, North Melbourne has worked this out with their imports of Jack Darling, Luke Parker and especially Caleb Daniel all helping to unlock aspects of their game that they didn’t have last year, particularly around physicality and transition.

The game against Adelaide last week really drove home the lack of competent adults on the field.

The established guys that Essendon do have outside of Merrett, were terrible.

Dylan Shiel fumbled everything.

Outside of him, McKay was dreadful, Draper was okay, McGrath was quiet, and Redman was overmatched.

There isn’t enough there.

Against a barrel-chested team like the Crows (is Scott Thompson running their weights program these days), you felt it.

Essendon was bullied.

Adelaide, with their four beast key forwards in Thilthorpe, Fogarty, Curtin, and Taylor were uniquely able to abuse Essendon but at a certain point you can’t avoid that Zach Reid is skinny.

So is Nate Caddy. So is Harry Jones. So is everyone except Caldwell.

It wasn’t just weight. It was attitude. The game had a bully and bullied element to it at every level.

The bully factor led to fumbling, bad skills, and getting bench pressed off the ball to the point where Adelaide scored 109 points off turnover – the most any team has scored from turnover since Brisbane against Richmond in round 10 of 2024.

In the end, their spirit was killed. The Bombers had had 40 fewer disposals and 12 fewer tackles than the Crows. They weren’t interested in standing up for themselves.

That you really can’t have.

It was a demolition job that could shake a club.

I think Brad Scott is an excellent coach, but it shook me enough to ask the same question that I asked of him in 2019: Have you cut too deep?

 

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