Every year, about this time of year, supporters of AFL clubs cleave into roughly three groups. The first, whose teams are safely inside the final eight and particularly the top four, start pencilling in a grand final party; members start thinking about grand final tickets; well-off non-members start pondering how they can write off a “grand final entertainment package” as a tax deduction (after experiencing one of these, I think I’d prefer a barbeque in the MCG carpark). The second group, those whose teams are fighting to secure a finals position, or perhaps a top-four spot, hang on every goal. The third? Watching to see how the younger members of the team’s squad perform when promoted to the firsts, and most importantly, devouring the reports of the under-18 elite competitions to find out which future stars their team might pick up in the AFL draft. Winning? While their heart might want their team to win, their head says that finishing down at the bottom of the ladder gets higher draft picks. If your team performs particularly badly and wins fewer than five games, it gets an extra “priority draft pick”, giving it a chance to pick up another very good player. If the team wins fewer than five games two years in a row, the “priority draft pick” is the first pick of the year, giving the team the chance to pick the best junior of the year’s draft.
The Melbourne Demons are in that fortunate/unfortunate position this year, having won three games last year, and three so far this year. They almost won a fourth on the weekend, when another team of perennial underachievers, Richmond, kicked the winning goal after the siren. But that winning goal had been preceded by some very odd tactical moves by the Demons’ coach Dean Bailey:
However, after Jordan McMahon’s goal after the siren gave the Tigers a dramatic four-point victory, there were lingering doubts about whether the Demons hierarchy was as unhappy with the result as their shattered players.
Melbourne coach Dean Bailey was quizzed after the game about a number of seemingly unusual moves – particularly the use of key defenders Matthew Warnock and James Frawley in attack, ruckman Paul Johnson at full-back, the non-selection of silky midfielder Colin Sylvia.”
While speculation this year has been particularly focussed on Melbourne, suspicions of “tanking” have been around for years now. Michael Voss, new coach of Brisbane and former premiership captain, has called for the life banning of any coach proven to tank; perhaps more interestingly, he has called for a change to the AFL draft system to remove the incentive to tank – the abolition of the priority pick and a lottery for the bottom-four teams to determine the order of the first four draft picks.
Voss’s proposed amendments to the draft would certainly remove the tanking incentive from really poor-performing teams, but in the process it creates a new one for teams ranked just outside the bottom four. Nor does it take into account the issue that the priority pick was created for in the first place – ensuring that truly uncompetitive teams get a leg-up back to finals contention, an aspect I wouldn’t like to see removed from the competition. But it seems to me that late-season tanking issues could be dealt with in a way that doesn’t compromise the AFL’s socialist competition structure.
In a nutshell, as the season goes on and more and more teams drop out of finals contention, the likelihood of tanking increases. So why not come up with a system for allocating draft picks that weights early-season games, where presumably all teams will be going all-out to win, more highly, and attaches little weight to games late in the season? And, furthermore, why not take the principle of the priority pick a little further, and include results from the last two, or perhaps even three seasons, when calculating draft picks, thus reducing the impact of any one game on the results?
I’ll leave it up to my team the mighty Fitzroy Dockers to provide a Freo perspective on the issue.
I quite like Voss’ suggestion. I think yours Rob might be complicating things too much, and might also mean teams who lose a key player midseason to a career or long-term injury, and really need a strong replacement, would miss out due to their good early results.
While a team that just gets its shit together through great coaching or what have you might still get early picks even though they finish top 8.
Some points:
1) Voss’s suggestion creates a new incentive to tank if you’re in ladder positions 10-14 near the end of the season.
2) It doesn’t help teams like Melbourne who really should be helped in my view.
3) If you take results over two or three seasons teams mysteriously “getting their shit together”, or losing players to injury, should balance itself out to a greater degree.
4) I don’t see that complexity is a problem here. The problem is perceived fairness. Duckworth-Lewis is complex, but it’s generally agreed to be a lot fairer than the cricket rain rules that preceded it so it’s mostly accepted by players and fans.
Isn’t the “tanking conundrum” really just a way for lazy sports journalists to fill column inches at this time of year? They pull out their stock ‘tanking’ pieces, change the names around and hey presto another great article.
To me, it seems like the crushing blow to team morale from trying to lose a match (let alone 5 matches in a row) would be more damaging than a priority pick would be helpful.
As a member of a team which was exonerated of any tanking allegations last weekend (go Eagles!), and which still holds the greatest number of memberships in the AFL, this issue seems like such a beat up.. I just can’t take it seriously.
Sorry, I didn’t read as far as your suggestion on spreading results over multiple years.
*slaps wrist*
That would fix a lot, and justify the complexity.
Andos: if you’re talking about a priority pick, you generally don’t have to try to lose five games. At most, it’s one or two.
And there’s heaps of things a coach can do that fall between going all-out to win and telling players explicitly to tank.
Insofar as you can “prove” tanking, it still doesn’t make sense for a coach to be punished for taking advantage of a scheme designed to reward poor performance. (If that’s socialism of any sort, I’ll strike my red flag now).
As selections go, it seems to me that teams like Melbourne would be helped more by an ability to recruit more experienced players outside the salary cap, rather than by taking very young draftees. There’s a lot of sense to the A-League system of marquee players, which allows young players to learn by having match time with people who’ve had a great deal more playing time under their belts. Wouldn’t you want a poorly performing club to build on experience rather than inexperience?
I exclude the very young Liam Jarrah from this, obviously. Apart from having a kick-arse name, the guy is superhuman.
Go Eagles! Legitimate losers!
/carn-the-swans
Nah, keep it how it is.
The perennial cellar-dwellers constantly waste their charity picks by picking the wrong players and/or failing to develop the talent they have.
And yes, I’m looking at you Melbourne, Richmond and Fremantle.
And St Kilda, preening yourself on your temporary success. You’re not exempt. How wasteful have you been with decades of charity-provided talent? And how close are you to subsiding into your usual condition of under-performing mediocrity?
These deeply ingrained cultural shortcomings add tragedy and farce to the cyclical drama of successive footy seasons.
As John Howard used to say, it’s all a matter of incentivisation. If teams have the incentive to tank, they will.
“Deeply ingrained cultural shortcomings”
Word. As a Freo supporter, my prescription is to forget finding new players, and find a team of top-notch psychiatrists. Wouldn’t come under the salary cap either!
If you expand the lottery to include every team that misses the finals, and then weight the probabilities to favour the worst teams getting the top pick, it seems that would take care of incentives and equity. It’s the system in the NBA.
Excuse me, Liam
JarrahJurrah. I’m obviously confused with the commenter of similar name.Alternatively you could just get rid of the draft entirely, and let the clubs look after their own recruitment. We’ve never had a draft in the NRL and it hasn’t had any of the dire effects that pro-draft people in other codes complain about. The imposition of a strict salary cap on both the first-grade and NYC teams still ensures that wealthy teams can’t dominate recruitment, so we get that effect without having to deal with the unedifying sight of teams deliberately losing games. (Why is a single draft pick considered such a reward, by the way? Surely gaining possession of an ankle-biter who presumably would be years off first grade and will likely as not perform well below expectations isn’t really such an incentive to ‘tank’.)
I favour giving the top pick to the team that finishes ninth, second top to tenth, etc down to 16. That would put some real life into those bottom 8 clashes. Teams on the bottom would still be getting good picks and would improve over time, while teams that have just missed on the finals would get a decisive boost to their campaigns for the next year, along with the morale boost of having earned it.
FDB at 1: That’s the most brutal yet true thing I’ve seen since the new Freo slogan was unveiled:
Anyway, we can’t be tanking for draft picks… just look at our record with them (hindsight, it’s a marvellous thing). We wouldn’t end up with anything out of it. If we got the priority pick, we’d probably use it to trade the rising star of 2010 to Geelong while in return getting a 29 yr old player who plays a dozen games and disappears into the sunset… again. Damn team, I love ‘em but they do make me suffer sometimes.
Anyway, the annual tanking debate’ll all be ignored for the next couple of years when the Gold Coast lands in the draft like a giant talent-sucking black hole. I would’ve thought a new team should have to be able to source a slate of players locally if they expect to be that region’s team, but apparently not – it’s all about the $$ up there. If the Dockers (or the Dees / Tigers / Wet Toast) stay down the bottom of the ladder in 2010, all the tanking in the world won’t help us… we’ll just have to get good players locally. Incidentally, South Freo are top of the WAFL table at the moment. The draft’s overrated.
Agreed on all points BoP.
Re: my team’s run-through banner – yes, a tad brutal. I thought other Freo fans might like it. Double the fun when we beat the East Coast Eagles, then won in the real derby too. “We might be shit, Eagles, but we always beat you guys” is the subtext.
Robert@2
It seems to me that any sport that has to devise something as Byzantine as Duckworth_Lewis admits that the format isn’t feasible. If nobody but a mathematician or someone with a complex set of charts that recalculates in real time can figure out whether dead batting the next delivery makes sense or squealing about going off in light rain or dodgy light does then the format is a farce.
You either play the match indoors or redesign it so that it is short enough to be played most of the time or in some other slot — hence T20.
As to the AFL and tanking isn’t the obvious solution to lose the draft and the salary caps? Let the chips fall where they may. If this results in a much smaller leaner competition, isn’t that a good thing?
Fran, imagine Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” without The Gimp.
The Gimps must be kept alive.
GayFL,that,s what they call it in West Sydney,kinda says it all,though I doubt it would be called that in the upper middle class that follow the 48 chickens looking for a chip
So they have discovered rhyme in West Sydney?
Who says that primary education is a waste of public money?
I was never a Tarantino fan but why must these be kept alive, Katz?
John: witty.
Fran, then you end up with the Premier League. And it works wonders for Man U and their millions of Chinese fans who will never see them play live. But I wouldn’t like to see it replicated in the AFL.
Jenny, what happens to the team that finishes 16th every year?
BM-dog: not entirely convinced by the argument that a salary cap is enough to equalize competitions. Some clubs have structural disadvantages that suggest that they need additional help; perhaps they’re not getting enough additional help right now. As others have pointed out, Melbourne, Richmond, and Freo are good examples.
That said, one thing that makes the competition more uneven is the relative lack of the mercenary mentality of AFL players compared to other codes, and the lack of free agency. If those two things changed, and there were more mid-career transfers by upper-echelon players, that would also likely result in a more even competition.
Katzy
Thankfully those deeply ingrained cultural shortcomings which add tragedy and farce to the cyclical drama of successive footy seasons are constantly leavened by the humour of Geelong losing grand finals. (Pity about 2007, when you were lucky enough to meet Port, who were just happy to be there.) This year’s episode ought to be just as side-splitting as last year’s.
By the way, I hear Chappy’s done his hammy again.
I suspect (from a great distance) that ‘tanking’ is a lot more complex than just ‘trying to lose’.
For a team whose season is blown, experimenting with young players and trying experienced players in new positions is quite defensible. These tactics may prove to be highly valuable come next season – when it counts – and cost little if they don’t come off.
I suspect that the mindset behind experimentation is much closer to “something to gain, nothing to lose” than it is to “lets try and bomb thios game”.
I agree with Jenny @ 13.
By the by, unless you extracted a confession, proving a coach was tanking would be hard, and you wouldn’t need to be Rumpole of the Bailey to defend said coach.
Robert@22
You really think an AFL Premier League would get millions of Chinese or remote fans who never see them?
Maybe there would be ten teams — with one in each of the capitals except for Tassie and a couple of extras — Geelong, Port etc
It seems fair enough … you could have a shorter season and have each of the games more of an event. Players could be allowed time to recover from niggling injuries as games could be suspended once every four weeks or so.
For those who like that kind of caper, it might actually be better. Certainly, for those of us who find loudmouthed commentators doing their much ado about nothing schtick on every AM channel every winter it would be a blessed relief.
Jenny @ 13.
You are an AFL genius. I happen to agree with your criteria for determining draft order.
To fix the draft system:
First I would shoot Andrew Demetriou
Then I would abolish priority picks.
Next, I would award first pick to the ninth placed team, second to tenth etc. down to 16th placed team getting 8th draft pick. This would put incentive back into late-season clashes amongst non-finals-bound teams.
Then I would award picks from the 8th-places team up to 1st placed team. No-one deliberately loses a final.
Voila – El tanko destructo! Viva THE GAME!
All 2nd and later round picks to be awarded by lottery.
I quite liked Chas Licciardello’s suggestion of choosing a random round between rounds 13 and 22 and using the ladder positions from that round to determine the draft order:
http://www.realfooty.com.au/news/news/bafl-chaserb-scuttling-tankers-without-affecting-fuel-prices/2008/07/15/1215887630757.html?page=fullpage
Either that or the weighted-NBA lottery – just any system where the payoff from losing one or two particular matches is only marginal.
“Fran, then you end up with the Premier League. And it works wonders for Man U and their millions of Chinese fans who will never see them play live. But I wouldn’t like to see it replicated in the AFL.”
The AFL *is* the Premier League, but without promotion/relegation from/to lower divisions. Why not demote the bottom couple of AFL teams to the state league and promote the top couple of state teams. (other than, of course, the millions of dollars at stake for entrenched interests)
And what Martin said.
d
Sorry Fran, what I meant to imply that I think your proposals would result in a competition not unlike that of the big European leagues, where only three or four teams ever have a realistic chance of winning.
These teams attract quite literally millions of casual fans, at the expense of the health of the rest of the competition.
A topic close to my heart. I’ve been on this for quite a while.
Firstly, you need to satisfy AFL requirements. The draft order and priority pick system are designed to assist poorly performing teams. Any proposed system that doesn’t satisfy that requirement falls at the first hurdle. So forget about awarding first pick to 9th etc. Even lotteries don’t look promising from that perspective.
Secondly, the incentive to tank is what needs to be taken away – especially the incentive to tank at the end of the year. And the teams that cause all the trouble are those sitting, say, 12th to 14th, who have their eye on a better pick or a priority selection. You need to keep those teams from drifting (artificially) down the ladder toward the end of the season.
My solution? Reduce the ‘tanking zone’ – a team’s window for benefitting from losing games. A team will start to think about what they can get out the season once their finals chances are gone. Admittedly, that comes quite early for teams right at the bottom; but a team sitting on 5 wins after 12 rounds might still be weighing up their chances of making the eight if things go right for them. They usually pack it in about round 15.
Don’t award the picks at the end of the year. Dole them out sequentially as each team’s mathematical chances for reaching the finals disappear.
For example: if, after round 17, the team sitting last is 6 games out of the eight with 5 rounds left, they get awarded their pick. From then on, whatever they do they have their pick and no-one can take it away from them. As soon as the next team can’t make the finals, they get their pick 2. And so on, until picks 7 and 8 (say) are awarded after round 22.
That way, any club is weighing up their finals chances against their draft pick. By the time they start to think about what else they can get from the draft, it’s too late for tanking to do them any good.
This has the benefit of weighing up a team’s worth while their season is still ‘live’. It’s also easy to understand and easy to implement. It won’t completely eradicate tanking – under certain circumstances – but it will remove the vast majority of it, and will keep the end of the season from becoming a farce.
The other thing I’d do is, rather than tie priority picks to games won, simply decide them on what picks a team has qualified for already. If they get picks 1 or 2 two years running, they get a priority pick, regardless of games won. That way, they’re only being judged against their competitors.
I’d be keen to hear feedback on this one.
I still carry injuries from trying to bean under age footballer,and as slow as the wet weeks of Melbourne in training for Hastings,Vic.Glad I am living in N.S.W. I only have to avoid the Rugby codes,soccer and cricket tennis, car racing etc. to know I am no longer in Victoria.Hurrah! Horse racing bowls…….Come to think of it,I may be competitive in the well rehearsed practice and experience of avoiding these sports and comments about them wherever they occur.Other than that the Merkel Brand of AFL seems to have some merit.Soft spot for tug-of-war and the local Coffs Seikhs as my team to watch.Pity they don’t have their very own home team throat singing song.In English,of course!?One day, I might be a specialist commentator,above the roar of the tug-of-war crowds!
“I exclude the very young Liam Jarrah from this, obviously. Apart from having a kick-arse name, the guy is superhuman.”
“Excuse me, Liam
JarrahJurrah. I’m obviously confused with the commenter of similar name.”Robert@30
Please pardon my ignorance but
a) in Rugby League a lot more than four teams have a realistic chance of winning the competition (though in any one season you can probably guess which four teams they are). You might like to look at what has happened to teams like Easts and Penrith and Balmain of course who were in that four not so long ago.
b) How similar are the strucurtes of AFL within an Australian context to Premier League in the UK?
1. AFL is played only in Australia. Soccer is played everywhere, and right next door to England
2. AFL sponsorship is of no value to anyone without a domestic market in Australia whereas English soccer sponsorship works in foreign markets
3. There is very little scope for new fans to go over to AFL. It’s a mature market so it’s unlikely top attract casual observers. It’s going to stay tribal — the only difference is that more of the ten teams (if that’s what it got down to) would be competitive
Watch the film Fran.
Who is Chappy?
Although I still regard tanking as being exaggerated, nonetheless I mention another technique which would appeal to the mathematical systems builders. That is to base the draft on a weighted ballot. Draft order is determined by ballot, but the chances of each team in the ballot is weighted according to final ladder position (with lower teams being more strongly weighted).
This immediately reduces the incentive to tank since teams cannot guarantee their draft order by finishing in a particular position. Of course there is still some incentive to tank since a lower finish creates a greater probability of a high draft pick.
The weighting function would determine the balance between helping poorly performing teams and providing an incentive to tank. If the weighting is equal then there is no incentive – and no assistance – while the more heavily weighted the lower teams are the more assistance – and more incentive to tank.
Construcitng the precise form of the optimal weighting function should be a matter of some delight to those of a particular nerdish persuasion
Martin@36
What about N=((int)(F!((P+1)^-2))) [rounding up where Modulus N> 0.5]
N= Number of lots in barrel, P = Competition place value
Oops should read:
What about N=((int)(F!((P+1)^-2))) [rounding up where Modulus N/1> 0.5]
N= Number of lots in barrel, P = Competition place value
Fran@34: league retains a salary cap, as I understand it.
If your position that the AFL has no chance of attracting large numbers of casually-interested supporters (a proposition that the AFL clearly doesn’t accept, given their interest in West Sydney) is correct, that makes keeping the supporter bases of the existing clubs happy even more important.
Robert@39
Yes, the league does, but that’s only so they can hold on to the large number of teams — and that is failing now anyway. Cronulla will probably vanish next year and a couple of other clubs are fairly marginal, apparently. They could probably manage ten teams without a salary cap
I’m not sure why shrinking to ten teams (if that is what happened over the next half dozen years) would upset the supporter base all that much.
Premier League clubs don’t just play each other, either. A draft and/or Salary cap in the premier league would just result in all English teams being trounced in the European Cup matches by European teams without such handicaps.
It works fine in the AFL though, because AFL teams don’t have to play anyone else outside their own system.
I like Rob’s idea about awarding the priority pick based on a rolling average of results from the last 3 or 4 seasons. This would make tanking much less immediately effective and also do what the draft is supposed to do (help the perennial cellar-dwellers improve) better.
I still don’t think it will help Freo much though. The only thing that will help us is a cloning program so we can go into the 2029 season with 3 Sandilands, 8 Pavlichs, 5 Haslebys and 6 Duffields.
“go into the 2029 season with 3 Sandilands”
Kyle Sandilands has had some of his time freed up, so you can have two of them.
One man’s tanking is another’s list management. It was going on even before there was a draft. Teams near the bottom would put stars in for needed operations, try kids, new positions and look at everyone on the list. That was in an era far closer to free agency than what we have now and the only benefit was an early start to the following season.
Almost all “anti-tankers” fail to understand that as long as you have a draft system designed to push up weak clubs, you’ll have this argument. You either have a draft and tanking, or you have free agency and perennial losers. Further, I can’t believe they imagine the Melbourne/Richmond game supports their argument when Richmond only won on the last (& controversial!) kick of the day.
The BigFooty forums provide a wonderful insight to this cognitive dissonance. That’s the problem with football and politics – it quickly becomes about your hated opposition instead of the policy at hand.
IMNSHO If a side loses while making only a pretense of trying, they’re still bad enough to lose anyway. In which case they need picks.
I remember in 2007 when we played Collingwood in round 20. I saw a Carlton supporter being dragged from the ground by five cops because she was taking the game so seriously. We really wanted to win, but the moment we were buried, a lot of us thought “Oh well, at least we still have the priority pick.” However, a consolation prize is not cheating, it’s a silver lining. Further, the people who were then chanting “Carltank!” would, at the same time, all cheerfully agree that we were a really crap side who couldn’t beat anyone. No detectable irony.
Lastly, St.Kilda, Hawthorn, Richmond, Collingwood, and Carlton have all benefited from the system in the past – I don’t see why it should be changed now they’re all (OK, not Richmond) near the top of the ladder. The rules should be consistent, otherwise they only benefit a few.
It’s bad enough with the compromised draft involving Gold Coast and West Sydney coming up, they shouldn’t screw clubs like Melbourne who have the bad luck of rebuilding now.
Yobbo @41, Freo’s a bit of a puzzle, really. They look to have the cattle, but keep falling in a hole. There’s something wrong, but can’t put my finger on it.
I don’t think any team deliberately tanks for priority picks; there may be one or two players who might consider it, but I doubt any coach could persuade a whole team to do so; they’d lynch him. I’m with Andos on this one; bored journalists wanting to create a bit of a buzz.
Fascinating discussion – really – for one who through regrettable geographical reasons to do with birth and upbringing knows little about the sport in question, other than that the term “GayFL” is used far more widely than just western Sydney.
What is most fascinating, though, is the apparent widespread acceptance by almost all that, in sport, disincentives to real competition, and over-zealous attempts to impose “equity” by regulatory fiat, lead to poor performance. I could swear I have seen a number of those arguing this case equally stoutly maintaining that, in the economy, these sorts of policies do nothing of the kind.
For what it’s worth given my state of AFL ignorance, if tanking is really a problem, I’m with Darryl Rosin – promotion/relegation would fix it immediately, though the fact that the second tier competition(s) is state-based would presumably be an issue in settling who is promoted.
Another way of evening out levels of clubs is what is done in regard to Super 14 squads, at least in NZ. Each (province-based) franchise picks its core squad from within its own provincial ranks – 24 out of 28 players from memory. The other 4 can be drafted from other franchises (ie from players in those provinces outside the 28 protected by each franchise), on a first come first served basis, So if if franchise A has 4 terrific tight head props and only needs two, the other two can get gane time with other teams. Like all forms of artificially imposing equality, it doesn’t really work, mind you.
Jane @ 44 – I recently read a very good article that analysed the Shockers list management since inception. Basically they have been consistently trading picks to recruit current players to try to fill existing capability deficits. Impatatience has cost them dearly. The article compared them with Hawthorn and it was a stark contrast between a club that had allowed the draft system to work versus the Shockers trading strategy.
The AFL draft is about the only place I support socialism.
Fran: a number of Melbourne clubs have been pushed to merge, move, or both, by the AFL over the past 30 years.
In every case, a large fraction of the supporter base was grossly annoyed in the process, and most of the changes were defeated by member activism. In the changes that went through (the move of South Melbourne to Sydney, and the “merger” of Brisbane and Fitzroy), a substantial fraction of the supporter bases departed, never to return.
The AFL seems to have mostly decided mergers and moves aren’t worth the grief.
Jane @ 3.07pm,
Crap club culture. Easily identified. When Robert Shaw and Mark Harvey went to Freo from Essendon, they told several people close to them that they were shocked by the lack off effort, and the lack of desire to win, they found amongst the playing group there.
Shaw in particular pout it down to the fact that the players were rock stars in Perth no matter whether they won or lost. The girls still shagged them, the bars and clubs still gave them free drinks, the fans still loved them no matter what. So why be too bothered about winning or losing? All the same in the end, really.
As for the draft, it doesn’t really matter whether teams tank or not. Because as much as Demetriou mightn’t like it, the current system has two flaws that render it unworkeable…firstly, there is a PERCEPTION that teams tank. And that is as destructive to the competition as if they were.
Secondly, whether they take it or not, the system provides an incentive for teams to tank. And that is a systemic flaw that needs correcting.
The solution is reasonably simple – a weighted lottery, in the style of the NBA. The NBA introduced their lottery in response to the perception that teams were deliberately losing in order to gain the draft rights to Patrick Ewing. Whether they were or not, the league recognised a PR and integrity problem and dealt with it….most satisfactorily, I’d suggest.
Finally, Voss’ suggestion of life bans for coaches caught tanking is the dumbest thing I think I’ve ever heard him say. A coach is charged with putting his club in the best possible position to succeed…under the current system, that could mean losing deliberately, very easily. Banning coacches for doing their job is ridiculous.
Much better to change the system.
I agree wholeheartedly with Patriot
While you cannot completely eliminate the incentive for teams to reduce their effort in a draft system that gives poor performing teams access to more highly rated juniors, you can reduce that incentive through an NBA style draft lottery.
Robert, your idea of giving greater weight to early season games is interesting, though you would have to be careful that to take into account the potential inequality of the draw.
For example, my understanding of the way the current draw is constructed is that teams that finish in the eight are more likely to play each other twice the following year.
In addition, you can get anomolies earlier in the year. For example, in 2008, my team, Port Adelaide, lost its first 4 matches, after making the grand final in the previous year.
At root, you have an identification problem. Which teams that finish low on the ladder have genuinely poor squads and which teams finished low for other reasons – poor coach, injuries to key players, reduced effort, etc?
While an NBA draft lottery style system isn’t perfect in that a genuinely poor team may not get access to the best couple of players in the draft, the weighting system is such that the probability of coming last and not getting one of the top four picks is low, and the system does reduce the incentives for putting in less effort.
Razor and Patriot, agree. But that doesn’t explain why the Eagles who are even more idolised, have still managed to get their sh!t together to win 3 premierships. It has to come down to club culture, unwillingness to invest the time to develop a young side into a team, and a lazy, arrogant side I suppose.
Now, LO what’s going on with Port? They’re driving me mad! What’s worse is seeing arrogant Tingles supporters strutting around as if they own the world. I went to the showdown and was absolutely disgusted with their booing of Tredders and Chad. I don’t think you’d get a much cleaner player than Tredrea; he certainly seems to cop more interference from the opposition without getting a well-deserved free.
Port are driving me crazy as well Jane – just can’t string consecutive wins together….Fortunately I’m on the other side of the world so don’t have experience the frustration in real time!!
Tredrea is a very clean player….Crows supporters just wish he played for them, well at least when he was the best CHF in the competition….he also seems to have become a target after his over the top celebrations following the preliminary final win against the Kangaroos in 2007…..Chad has never been popular because he likes to get in the faces of opposition supporters….
My suggestion from quite a while back at Andrew Leigh’s place was for a “double lottery”
Here.
There is still a late season incentive to be crap. But not necessarily completely crap. Socialism works pretty well in the AFL – hasn’t just about every team played in a preliminary (or at least semi) final over the past eight years?
The main reason why the AFL has this issue is because it is the pinnacle competition for the sport. Unlike soccer and rugby, there are no overseas leagues to buy or sell players to, therefore making the enforcement of a draft system very simple. Also, there is no point comparing the AFL to soccer in Europe on this issue because every single significant European domestic league has a relegation system, therefore making tanking pointlessly suicidal.
The AFL draft system doers have a worthy goal of trying to keep the teams reasonably equal. No one (besides the few big clubs, I’d suspect) wants to see the same situation as in many European soccer leagues, where the silverware is held by the same oligarchy of clubs for decades on end. I also think that the talk about tanking is overblown. Even in European soccer, that most free market system, there are plenty of examples of teams putting out deliberately understrength sides, particularly at the end of the season once a club is assured of staying up. It’s just a logical time to try new ideas when the pressure is off and there is nothing to play for. I reckon that 99% of the time that a team is accused of tanking that this it is only experimentation that is actually happening.
However, the perception matters as much as reality and so some fine tuning is probably required. The system mentioned by some previously of allocating picks based on the ladder after round 15 has the most merit to me. It is a fairish evaluation of the club comapared to the rest (everyone has played each other once) and it happens early enough in the season so that teams (except for the truly shit, who aren’t good enough to tank anyway) usually have the chance of finals to play for and so won’t even consider tanking. In any case, I’m not expecting too much to change anyway. The AFL seems to ahve a very hard time admitting to a fault in anything it does, and I don’t expect this issue to be any different.
Yobbo – I don’t have the article but if you look at the draft picks they have given away and what they have taken in the past five years it is pretty astonishing reading. It wasn’t eight years out of date. A few recent names for you – Tarrant, Solomon – why????
Solomon they got for pick 42 and pick 47 (And Fremantle received pick 52 along with Solomon). Those picks are often not even used by most clubs. You do sometimes get a gem out of these low picks (Justin Westhoff pick 71 in that draft) but in general they are often not exercised simply because teams don’t have room on their list.
In the Tarrant trade they give pick 8 + Paul medhurst (who was going to be delisted) in one of the weakest drafts in living memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_AFL_Draft
It should be noted that 2006 in Fremantle finished 3rd, they saw it as their “premiership window” and so took 2 mature AFL players that year. Turned out not to be but considering what eventuated from those picks they didn’t lose much either.
In fact the biggest loss from those trades was Paul Medhurst himself, who was always underrated by Fremantle as being a poor man’s Jeff Farmer, but has been very good at Collingwood.
I went to the tanking game on Sunday, as a Melbourne supporter. It is clear that
1. The team itself is simply not good enough to tank deliberately, even with about 9 players – injured or in the case of their best (Sylvia) mysteriously left out after a 3 week suspension) – out of their best side! Richmond must be pretty woeful to rely on a kick after the siren to beat such a decimated team that had only 19 fit players in the last quarter and was being coached by Bailey.
2. The coach was tanking, without any doubt at all, although the players were not. This ‘experimentation’ stuff is a smokescreen – no ‘experimentation’ on the scale seen last Sunday has been carried on in any prior match this year.
I don’t know what the eventual answer will be to the tanking problem, but as a Demon fan I hope to see the team benefit in the same way that St Kilda and Carlton have in recent years – just imagine what Carlton might be like if they had not lost draft picks through their salary cap malfeasance. Melbourne lost out in the infamous tanking game against Carlton two seasons ago, the one which allowed Carlton eventually to recruit Judd.
Perhaps the best thing would be to remove the priority pick (after the Dees have benefited from it, of course). One thing that is being assumed in all the discussion is that the #1 pick is bound to be the best, the #2 second best and so on. It’s pretty clear that great players can spring from anywhere in the draft, and the #1 is not necessarily going to be an outstanding player. However, when the bottom club has 3 picks in the top 20 as Melbourne did last year (with the level of success yet to emerge) it certainly does provide the incentive to lose. Removing the extra ‘priority’ pick might be part of the answer in the future.
I read an interesting proposal the other day in a comment on the herald sun site, why not base the priority system on percentage… that reflects how competitive sides have been across whatever time period you chose (ie one, two, three years) really bad teams (those in true need of help) are more likely to be on the receiving end of some thumpings and it becomes a whole lot more difficult to manipulate the outcome by tactics like shifting fullbacks to full forward in one quarter of a game.
Nine to be precise. Carlton’s most recent preliminary final was in 2000 and every other team has appeared in a preliminary final since then.