Good To See That The AFL Draft Is Evening Up The Competition

Isn't it good to see that all of the equalisation actions brought about by the AFL, such as the salary cap, draft concessions, the draft, priority picks, etc, is evening up the competition? We had three weekends in a row whereby the winner was victorious by 150 points or more. It is unusual for a team to actual score 150 points in an AFL match let alone win by that margin.

I remember one such match, way back in 1987 when I was still at school, when I was confident that Essendon would beat Sydney. So confident in fact that I bet five bucks to a schoolmate that they'd win. I couldn't understand why he took the bet. History shows that Sydney kicked the then highest score in the competition, 236 points, and won by a whopping 163 points. Yes, I don't so much as bet on the footy these days as I learnt a valuable lesson that day. And I did hand over the money.

Getting back to my point. I read an article entitled "You reap what you sow" and it places much of the blame for lopsided results at the hands of the administrators of the game. The article pointed out that before this season there had only been 14 matches with a winning margin of 150 points or greater. The AFL.ALLTHESTATS.COM Greatest Margins Website shows that there were 15, other than the three (so far) this season. What really surprised me, and what I was looking for in the first instance after reading the article above, was the earliest margin of 150 points. I can't quite believe that it dates back to 1899 when the game was still in its infancy. We had to wait another 32 years before seeing a win like that again.

And here was me thinking that these big wins had only come about in an age of big, strong men playing the game against a group of boys. It also happened a long time prior to professionalism taking over the game.