Let’s work out the tricky stuff first: Who’s going to miss out.
It’s predicted AFL ladder season, which guarantees a bunch of educated guesses which will all be wrong to some degree.
But there’s no point being boring with predictions — and there’s no point playing it safe. Especially because there is always more change than you think.
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Rule 1: On average there will be three changes to the top eight (teams dropping in/climbing out), and at a minimum two.
Last year was a perfect example with Collingwood, Fremantle and Richmond replacing Port Adelaide, GWS and Essendon in the top eight.
And when we say the minimum is two changes, we mean it. Since the top eight was introduced in 1994 there have been at least two changes every year. (The average, to be precise, is 2.8 changes.)
Rule 2: On average one team that missed the finals the year before will climb into the top four.
Last year this was Collingwood, and it would’ve been the Dockers if they’d happened to lose any of their many close games they kept somehow winning.
Not only that, but in four of the last six seasons, a team has jumped from the bottom six to the top four (Collingwood 2021-22 and 2017-18, Brisbane 2018-19, Richmond 2016-17).
While Rule 2 has not been right every single year like Rule 1 has, it has happened for eight seasons in a row. (The average is 1.2 teams that make the leap from non-finalist to top four.)
These rules give us some structure. They tell us that, even though it’s very hard to look at the ladder and pick which teams will drop out (especially this year), you need to find at least two if you’re any hope of being correct.
Unsurprisingly, it’s more likely that teams in the fifth to eighth range will drop out than teams from the first to fourth range. To be precise, of the 79 teams that have made the eight then dropped out the next year, 58 had finished 5th-8th, while just 21 had finished 1st-4th.
The numbers are very similar when you look at finals results: 24 teams made a prelim or and then missed the next year’s finals, compared to 55 teams that had lost in the first two weeks of September.
So back to Rule 1, and our most likely candidates to drop out of the top eight are Fremantle, Brisbane, Richmond and the Western Bulldogs, plus Melbourne given it lost in the semi-finals.
We’re going to rule the Demons out right away because they just seem way too good not to fix whatever ailed them in their post-bye slide.
The Lions and Tigers are in a similar group: Strong performers over the last four years who bolstered their midfields across the off-season (Brisbane with Josh Dunkley and Will Ashcroft; Richmond with Tim Taranto and Jacob Hopper), which should in turn help protect their defences, which leaked some big scores at times last year.
In contrast the Dockers and Bulldogs kind of shuffled some pieces around in the trade period.
Freo effectively swapped Rory Lobb for Luke Jackson; the latter is a better player long-term and likely short-term too, but he’s not exactly the A-grade forward they need to fix their scoring woes. Maybe Nat Fyfe can be that player, but that requires trusting his body to hold up for a full season.
The Bulldogs added Lobb, plus Liam Jones at the other end. Perhaps our next Treasurer should come from the Kennel because they’ve turned their talls deficit into a massive surplus. But it’s not as if on-paper talent has been a problem for the Dogs. For years we’ve expected more than they’ve produced. (It’s still remarkable that a Luke Beveridge team has never finished in the top four.)
So based on all of that, we’d be tipping the Bulldogs and Fremantle to drop out of the eight. Simple?
Well … then there’s Collingwood.
Look. If you’ve read anything we’ve written over the past six months you know our opinion on last year’s Magpies. But to shorten it: They were good last year, but fortunate to win as many games as they did (and thus fortunate to make the top four). Once they got to September they were absolutely the third-best team, but they also lost two close games … because that’s what happens in close games. You cannot win them consistently, especially year-to-year.
Last year’s Collingwood was a 16-win team with the percentage of a 12-win team. We’d put them somewhere in-between that in reality – just as good as the Fremantle/Brisbane/Richmond/Bulldogs quartet across the course of the season, and they peaked in September (which is a damn good time to peak).
They could easily be a better team this year yet win fewer games. And they could be this year’s Port Adelaide, who went from 17-5 in 2021 (with the AFL’s best record in close games) to 10-12 in 2022 (with the AFL’s worst record in close games).
So are we tipping the Magpies to actually drop out of the eight? Let’s see …
MAX LAUGHTON...
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