AFL seasons can fly by and 2019 feels like no exception. Come Sunday evening, seven rounds will have been completed; near enough to one-third of the home and away fixture.
What have we learned? Well, there’s been various teams emerging, others disappointing, while a slab of new rules don’t seem to have changed the game to anywhere near the extent forecast.
But in a season-defining sense, perhaps still not that much. Which makes this coming round pretty interesting, with a popular theory set to be put to the test.
Various football pundits over the years, myself included, have been fond of the “Round 7 Rule”. What is it, you ask? Well, little in AFL football is a given anymore, but for the past couple of decades, it’s been a reasonably reliable indicator of who we can expect to be featuring in finals come September.
In essence, the rule is that if you’re not in the top eight by the end of this weekend, there’s every chance you won’t be come the end of round 23, either.
In 18 completed seasons since 2001, only once has the composition of the top eight changed by more than two teams after round seven. That was in 2012, when Hawthorn, Geelong and North Melbourne all managed to fight their way into a finals berth.
Not from nowhere, mind you. In fact, those three were already the next three cabs in the queue when round seven was completed, sitting ninth, 10th and 11th, eventually swapping places directly with the three teams whose places they took, St Kilda, Carlton and Essendon.
In 10 seasons between 2002 and 2011, only once did the eight change by even two teams. That has happened more in recent years, two teams forcing their way in post-round 7 in four of the last five seasons. But there’s also been two occasions in the last six years where the make-up of the eight didn’t change at all after the middle of May.
Over that whole 18-year span, a total of 21 teams have come into the top eight after round seven, an average of just over one per season. The ramifications of that for any stragglers in 2019 are pretty obvious.
Apply that historical rule to the current top eight, however, and things start to look very interesting indeed.
It’s safe to say that a vast majority of pundits and tipsters who went through the exercise of coming up with a predicted ladder for 2019 wouldn’t have had the likes of St Kilda, Brisbane, Fremantle or even Port Adelaide (given how the Power imploded over the back half of last season) in their final eights.
Conversely, most would have had reigning premier West Coast a fair bit higher than 12th, Sydney a lot better than 16th and certainly not 2018 top-four team Melbourne stone motherless last.
So do we really think the ladder is going to remain essentially the way it looks now?
Because if we take that average change of one team, we’re looking at a pretty amazing finals make-up, St Kilda making it despite being almost universally seen pre-season as a bottom-two prospect, and Brisbane seeing finals action for the first time in 10 years.
Can “normal” transmission still be resumed? Well, it’s going to take something special for Melbourne, currently 1-5 and already three wins and an enormous stack of percentage outside the eight.
There are a couple of precedents. Sydney two years ago famously slipped to 0-6 before becoming the only side to recover from a start that bad and still make the final eight. And Richmond in 2014, whilst 2-4 at this stage, fell even further into the mire at 3-10, before peeling off an amazing run of nine wins in a row to get there. Those, however, have clearly been the exception, not the rule.
I’m a lot more confident about West Coast regaining its lofty status in time for another decent finals tilt. And you’d think at least one of Adelaide, Essendon or Hawthorn, given their capabilities, can also squeeze their way in to give the top eight a more familiar feel.
And if they don’t? Well, who can say just what the established order is these days anyway?
Our last three premiership winners, Western Bulldogs, Richmond and the Eagles have emerged from hardly lofty positions in their previous seasons. The minefield that has been AFL tipping this year should have served up some of the biggest upsets in memory. But has it?
I just went through the unexpected results from the 54 games played thus far. I could only come up with three (Brisbane’s win over West Coast in round one, Gold Coast’s win away against the Bulldogs and Fremantle’s upset of GWS in Canberra) which couldn’t have been championed by an at-least plausible argument beforehand.
What is the case now, however, is a lot of games much closer to 50-50 contests than they used to be, even home ground advantage seemingly not counting for quite as much as it once did.
And that might mean simply that perhaps no emergence or slide by any team is that big a shock anymore. That’s not great news for those of us in the business of football prognostications. But as diehard footy fans, most of us would still take that over predictability any day.
Whatever, it looks as though we’re destined for something different this year. Either a whole clutch of unexpected improvers duking it out in September, or should the expected status quo prevail, the defying of what in an uncertain age has been one of AFL football’s more reliable rules of thumb.
Rohan Connolly is one of Australia's foremost sportswriters – a veteran of both broadcast and print media. In the era of sanitised corporate sports media his is a perspective worth exploring. You can read more of Rohan's work at FOOTYOLOGY.
