They went full Le Chiffre last year, going all in on their aging list without much of a backup plan and hoping to get saved by the river, parting with three picks including their 2025 first a year for Dan Houston after parting with their 2024 first and a second rounder for Lachie Schultz.
The way they played seemed last year to be a tacit acknowledgement of that ageing process.
In their premiership year, if the Pies did one thing well it was run off the back half. They scored about 40 points a game from there which would have led the league in that metric in every year since 2021 except for the Dogs in 2025.
You felt it in the way that they iced the Grand Final. After Joe Daniher kicked a goal to make it 90-86 with about a minute and a half to go, Jarrod Berry won a clearance and went forward with a chaotic ball. After pinballing around it ended up in Nick Daicos’ hands at true centre half back.
Daicos didn’t even look when he won the ball because their processes of half back were so well-drilled, he just executed one of the best field kicks under pressure in living memory when he hit Will Hoskin Elliott on the wing a millisecond before Darcy Gardiner could get there.
Last year, the Pies were two years older and just didn’t have the kind of run to do that even after adding Dan Houston.
Where they scored 40 points from the back half in 2023, they scored 29 in 2025.
Instead, they tried to save their legs and become a front half team. In 2023 they spent about 50.5% of the game in the front half, which was eighth in the league and scored 37 points which was 15th.
In 2025, they were second in time in forward half with 53% and scored 46 points from the front half, which was fifth.
That can’t be explained by shifting with the sands of time, either. If anything, the broader game has gone in the opposite direction, with teams trying to win with ball movement rather than grinding front half pressure.
Instead, it was Ben Affleck robbing Fenway in The Town.
It was one last attempt to take this group of ageing legends to the mountaintop by focusing on what they can do, which was to structure up behind the ball and apply pressure on it, and not what they can’t: run.
Eventually, that front half style wore on the Pies. Over the last 5 games of the year including finals, they started to feel older and slower and couldn’t maintain the rage. Over those games, they only scored 38 points from the front half and felt, heading into the Prelim against Brisbane, like they were dragging themselves to the finish line and hoping for a miracle when they got there.
Imagine Jem turned up to the Fenway robbery with a bullet already in his legs. That’s how the Pies turned up to that prelim.
It ultimately finished like the Fenway job, with a rout at the hands of a better organised, better prepared opposition. Granted, Jem had a better run against the BPD than Mason Cox did against Harris Andrews.
Instead of reloading again this offseason, the Pies didn’t dip into the free agency or trade markets like they had in the last two years. They did not add a single established player and their highest pick was pick 32.
That decision feels like a tacit acknowledgement that last year was the last shot and this year is the take your medicine year before everyone heads to a TV career.
In addition to the age of the list, which will be the oldest and most experienced in the competition in 2026, the Pies just don’t have much talent or flexibility.
Their only superstar is Nick Daicos, and they lack genuine second line stars outside of Josh Daicos.
Even the star level talents that they have imported like Dan Houston spent last season stuck in a lockdown role. He just can’t play like a star in that role. Whenever he did get a kick it felt like it took on added meaning because he was getting so few of them and he played tightly with the pressure.
However, because of the Pies’ insistence on playing Josh Daicos and Steele Sidebottom across half back, players like Houston and Isaac Quaynor, were forced into lockdown roles to support Darcy Moore.
There is significant role congestion in defence, that looks hard to solve.
One option could be that the Josh Daicos foray into the heart of midfield against Gold Coast last year becomes the plan rather than a break glass in case of emergency option. But even then, he attended just 41% of centre-bounces in that game and never attended more than 20% for the rest of the season.
Clearly the staff just didn’t trust him in the guts, which is a significant indictment given how poor the midfield was last season.
The other option might be to drop Steele Sidebottom because of his immobility. But who do you drop Sidebottom for?
That brings us to the ultimate conclusion, which is that the Pies lack depth and don’t have enough star level talent at the top of the list even after years of putting the team on the credit card.
It’s a problem borne of sending out draft capital in the hope of getting one last bite at the cherry.
That issue crops up all over the park.
How much longer can you patch together winning scores without any key forwards?
Can you continue to live without any inside midfield talent?
None of these issues are necessarily fatal, but it’s an accumulation of problems that Collingwood cannot be trusted to fix because they don’t have enough depth to fix it.
This is the year that the bill comes due for Collingwood.