The great scandal of the game: the draw (and a neat way of dealing with the problem)

by Jim Young   The great scandal of the game in recent years has been tanking – or farting or shagging or whatever else they call it.  Last game or two – make sure we lose, in order to get an extra draft pick early on. Never mind that a good kid dragooned into a [Read more]

The AFL fixture is doing my head in

Peter Stewart has a crack at fixing the inequities in the AFL fixture.

the good, the not-so-good, and the awful: thoughts on the draw

by Trevor Blainey   a few thoughts on the draw for the Almanac.   like a lot of footy tragics i’ve thought about the draw a bit too much. divisions has appeal but i keep getting hung up on things like how after looking at a division based system would you make a fair finals [Read more]

Dave Nadel’s Dream Response

I prefer the idea of the existing comp divided into two geographical conferences. I have been arguing this for a while although the model I argued was based on sixteen teams which would have allowed for 22 rounds with each team playing members of their own conference twice and the other conference once. Twenty teams [Read more]

The Harms Dream

Gigs piece on the fixture, and its idiosyncrasies, injustices, inconsistencies, and conceptual weirdness, and his suggestion of a draw based on a Declaration of What is Good and Fair, and Inalienable in Football, is noble to say the least. Which, as commenters have noted almost universally in the words that follow, means that it is [Read more]