{"id":85288,"date":"2026-04-22T07:57:38","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T21:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/?p=85288"},"modified":"2026-07-03T10:29:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T00:29:28","slug":"equalisation-anxiety-the-case-against-panic-in-the-afl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/2026\/04\/equalisation-anxiety-the-case-against-panic-in-the-afl\/","title":{"rendered":"Equalisation Anxiety: The Case Against Panic in the AFL"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Remember early this season and for most of last year, when footy had an equalisation crisis?<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That led to a mostly conservative AFL commentariat talking about helping lift the teams off the bottom like they\u2019re Zohran Mamdani. Kane Cornes, he of \u201cSean Darcy is fat\u201d fame, said earlier this year that \u201cEvery decision the AFL make from here on in has to be with the end goal in mind to make the competition as even as possible.\u201d<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon enough we\u2019ll be teaching critical race theory and taxing the rich. Before we get to CGT discounts though, we\u2019re talking about making wholesale changes to the draft and everything else around it to try and make the bad teams good more quickly. Some want father\/son gone, others just want it to become almost prohibitively expensive. Others are sick of the academies and want them out.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But despite all the panic at the disco, we just had a round where even if most of the supposedly lower reaches of the ladder lost, they were almost all competitive except for Richmond.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in that Richmond game, it was North Melbourne who put them to the sword, piling on a 75 point win.<\/a> That very same North Melbourne that\u2019s been bad for six years and is now starting to come good with only light touch AFL assistance and access to the picks they should have got. The priority picks they did get after the 2023 season, which had to be traded and were at the end of the first round turned into Dylan Stephens, who has had a career best start to 2025.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only top tier v bottom tier game that was uncompetitive was the Western Derby, but in that game unlike for Richmond, you can see where West Coast is heading with their pressure and run.<\/a> They were competitive in the first half and play an attractive brand of footy, they just couldn\u2019t kick straight before an explosive Dockers team kicked away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even aside from one week of footy, which does not an argument make, there are two points that have been missed from the debate.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first point that\u2019s been missed is footy has always been like this. Footy has always lived on dynasties and teams staying good for a while then falling away as players get older and more injured. Since 2000, there has only been three premiers that played in one grand final, won the premiership, and wasn\u2019t in another Grand Final in the five years either before or after their premiership win<\/a>: Collingwood in 2023, Melbourne in 2021, and West Coast in 2018. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brisbane being as good as they\u2019ve been for as long as they\u2019ve been this good has always happened. Soon enough, even with their academies and their access to top free agents, it will end for them too. You can already see signs of slippage, as they sit 3-3 and they struggled to replace Dayne Zorko\u2019s kicking out of the back half against Melbourne.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Geelong\u2019s insane run of success is really the only counterargument, and the rarity of it only underscores my point. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it goes the other way as well, if you\u2019re going to undertake the wholesale rebuild and really invest in youth, it\u2019s always been a hard way to go about rebuilding. As a Richmond supporter who lived through the Tyrone Vickery years, I understand that.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not impossibly hard to do though, as we can see with Melbourne this year, which leads me to my second point.<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can fight the cyclical nature of footy by hiring the right man for the job.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve long said systems win seasons, but players win finals. It\u2019s true of rebuilding teams as well as contenders. If you have a system that fits within the framework of the modern AFL, you can at least partly avoid falling into the doldrums of the league. Even Essendon is seeing that now.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year, Melbourne has done a version of what Richmond did in 2023. They kept some experienced pillars almost as the structural underpinning of the team while populating key positions with kids like Jacob van Rooyen as a key forward, and Caleb Windsor and Harvey Langford as genuine centre bounce mids, to get them to grow.<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difference is, Steven King has leant into the new rules and embraced an extremely high variance, high transition game style while Adem Yze has leant into damage limitation across his three years as coach with no success given teams are scoring 110 points a game against the Tigers. Alastair Clarkson made a similar mistake in his first few years at North Melbourne, but now even the inventor of the lateral kick has his team going forward, trialling Cam Zurhaar at half back to give them more drive.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I accept that Richmond didn\u2019t and doesn\u2019t have any guys at the level of Max Gawn or Kozzie Pickett, but the broader point is still right. Melbourne players can\u2019t stop talking about how King has opened the game up for them and asked them to have fun running and attacking space in a Geelong type of system.<\/a> An attacking game style with a young list empowers players and makes sense with the modern rules.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, if you want to make father\/son more expensive, fine. But don\u2019t make it impossible. It\u2019s a quirk that makes our game genuinely special and different from the heavily corporatised American leagues that the AFL brass loves to go on junkets to visit.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s the same with academies. They make our game unique, and frankly it\u2019s good that our game has some level of geographic placement in the northern states. There\u2019s never been a more Sydney looking guy than Isaac Heeney. It\u2019s good that he plays there.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But don\u2019t throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is one of the most heavily equalised competitions in the world. We have a salary cap, a draft, and a soft cap, the latter of which is a concept that would make Stan Kroenke the owner of the LA Rams vomit.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are all good things, but they are enough.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t need more massive wholesale changes that rob the game of its uniqueness just because some consultant from McKinsey listed it at number six on their suggested changes table, right after five entries that just read \u201cfire everybody\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll leave you with this. We all remember the 2025 season which really was two-tiered and grim to watch. But none of us remember 2024 where 14 teams had at least 11 wins for the first time since the introduction of GWS to the competition. It was one of the most even years in the competition and it was just two years ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The AFL doesn\u2019t need to be a big government taking a huge role in equalising the competition. The game takes care of itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember early this season and for most of last year, when footy had an equalisation crisis?  That led to a mostly conservative AFL commentariat talking about helping lift the teams off the bottom like they\u2019re Zohran Mamdani. Kane Cornes, he of \u201cSean Darcy is fat\u201d fame, said earlier this year that \u201cEvery decision the AFL make from here on in has to be with the end goal in mind to make the competition as even as possible.\u201d   Soon enough we\u2019ll be teaching critical race theory and taxing the rich. Before we get to CGT discounts though, we\u2019re talking about making wholesale changes to the draft and everything else around it to try and make…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":85289,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8298],"tags":[8260],"hub_post_cat":[],"class_list":["post-85288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-australian-rules","category-guywholikessport","tag-guywholikessport"],"acf":{"md_tip_date":"","md_tip_date_end":"","md_market_url":"","tip_date":"22\/04\/2026","event_country":"Australia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85288"},{"taxonomy":"hub_post_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hub_post_cat?post=85288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}