Braden Quartermaine: Time to fix uneven draw as AFL’s annual fixture farce highlighted yet again

Nothing exposes the farce that is the AFL fixture like the final round, as teams hit the end of the regular season in a blanket finish. Coveted top-two and top-four positions coming down to the final game of the season. Calculators at the ready. Live ladders at the bottom of your TV screen. Carlton falling one point short. The Western Bulldogs falling in by 0.6 percentage points. Just a game between second and sixth on the final ladder. The trouble with it all is that the AFL season is like a 400m race where the judges forgot to implement a stagger. Some clubs get the inside lane, some get the outside lane and some get somewhere in between. Geelong claimed the minor premiership and did it with some help from the inside lane. Not only were the Cats the only finalist to get stragglers North Melbourne and West Coast twice each, they also got just one double-up against a fellow finalist — the eighth-placed Bulldogs. The Kangaroos and Eagles were statistically two of the worst teams this century, each finishing with a 2-20 record and with uncompetitive percentages of 55.8 and 59.8. Three teams — Geelong, Gold Coast and Adelaide — got to play both of them twice, another four teams got one of them twice and 11 teams didn’t get the chance to play either of them twice. The Cats won their four match-ups against the bottom two by a combined 275 points, with a whopping percentage across the four games of 236.1. And good on them. If you aim to continually compete, you put yourself in a position to take advantage of the breaks and in 2022, they certainly got them. Melbourne finished two games and percentage adrift of Geelong, but trod a much tougher path to get there. Four of the Demons’ five double-up fixtures came against fellow finalists and the lowest-ranked team they got to play twice was 11th-placed Port Adelaide. There’s inequality wherever you look. Maybe the Bulldogs deserved the footy gods to smile on them when they scraped into eighth spot, because they had to play double-up games against the top three finishers on the ladder in the Cats, Demons and Swans. Other finalists Geelong, Brisbane, Sydney and Richmond, along with Hawthorn, didn’t meet any of the top four a second time. The uneven draw can also affect livelihoods. Essendon coach Ben Rutten was sacked on Sunday after the Bombers slipped from eighth last season with 11 wins to 15th this year with just seven. In 2021, Essendon had double-ups against the sides that finished 6th, 7th, 14th, 17th and 18th. This season the Bombers copped double-ups against four finalists and Rutten copped it in the neck. Another 2022 slider Greater Western Sydney was also running from the outside lane, with the Giants getting all five double-ups against finalists in a brutal draw. St Kilda got four return games against teams that finished in the top six. Max King’s goal kicking didn’t help them, but neither did the unfair draw. In a competition where we have 18 teams playing each other over 22 rounds, for historical and practical reasons, there’s no perfect answer. Should the AFL expand to 19 or 20 teams in the future with the addition of clubs from Tasmania and the Northern Territory, the case for biting the bullet and having everyone play each other just once will become even stronger. But it’s well past time for integrity to play some sort of role in the competition. The introduction of some form of 17-5 fixture model, where teams would play each other once before being classified into three groups based on their standings, would be a good start. At least every team would be able to be judged after they have played each other once, which never happens now under a system where the clubs play 12 opponents once and five opponents twice. The league’s weighted fixture guidelines are a tiny step in the right direction, but are pretty meaningless in practical terms given the performance of any club is not guaranteed to remain steady from one year to the next. The argument that we should leave fixturing as it is because most seasons lead to exciting finishes is just as empty. Segments of the final ladder might end up even — however, it is all a bit of a sham when the fixture that led to it was not. HOW MANY FINALISTS YOUR TEAM HAD TO PLAY TWICE 5: GWS 4: Essendon, Melbourne, St Kilda 3: Carlton, Port Adelaide, West Coast, Western Bulldogs 2: Gold Coast, Hawthorn, North Melbourne 1: Adelaide, Brisbane, Collingwood, Fremantle, Geelong, Sydney 0: Richmond