Its been discussed before but the draft system is ruining the game...we have a forum divided on tanking games and a club looking forward to a lack of success for the next two years so we can get the fools gold in priority picks. Its morally wrong to be looking forward to losses and not trying to win each week..its football gone crazy and supporters driven to madness because of the system.

I'm not down on Synbad and the pro tankers they are only playing the system as its stands.....and being practical..I fully understand their logic.
Its the system and its sucks........make the draft a lottery for picks for say teams outside the eight or do something to take away this system where you have to engineer several bad years to have a cycle of good ones.....the whole thing is ludicrous and needs fixing and the AFL need to fix it before the game loses the grass roots supporter.

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sadly elwood I think the powers couldn't give a toss about grass roots supporters. This is a TV game designed for the fabulously innane where transient understanding of anything is too deep and what happened yesterday is so forgotten that it's dug up as a prescient glimpse into creativity!

I have no doubt this game will always remain a commodity on TV but it is not the game of my youth and will never be again. While I live and breathe I shall embrace it for the memories it has given me and grow angry as greed destroys its soul but in the end the figures add up in dollars and sense has no meaning.

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This type of slight is alien in the more cultured part of the world - Walsh. Its up there with mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun!

Two logical posts. What is happening to the world.

I think the draft makes reasonable sense if you take away the priority picks. IMO having a draft that supposedly helps the poor clubs get better by giving them early picks and then making the draft order a lottery is counter productive and against the actual "mission statement" of the entire concept.

By removing the PPs you remove the extra carrot, or lure to "tank". It might not remove the lure completely, but the game will always be compromised in some way.I think that needs to be accepted first and foremost, then work out ways to ensure the compromises are as fair as possible and as few as possible.

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Its Illegal By law in Australia and should be turfed out. Salary Cap should be all the AFL needs to implement its Socailist Equalisation Policy.

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Unfortunately Elwood the AFL will tell you that record crowds are going to the football so not much will change. The priority pick should either come later in the draft or the win/loss ratio to qualify needs to be over a longer period of time.
Melbourne has exploited the system more than any other club with the up and down seasons. StKilda has to a lesser extent due to the fact that they were shite for 3 years in a row.
I say keep the system until 2006 and then change it, we desperately need to cash in.

Funny that DB. Last night l whacked on a 1995 H&A game - Carl v NM. Beautiful day, sun shining, just on 32,000 at OO, no Legends stand (relatively not too long ago). There is no point of difference these days. I'm glad that l did experience what was truly unique about our game but unfortunately the same cannot be said for my young kids. I think the revolution started way back in 1981 when South was shipped off to Sydney.

The characters/tradition came and went: the peanut bloke, the whistler, the cops on horseback, the pressbox, the bluebirds, the scoreboard, the grog squad, the streamers, running onto the ground on the full time siren, the Herald's afternoon edition score updates, the sporting globe, etc.

Just remind me please.................the game is better for it right?

talk about progress

I noticed in the Age on the weekend that apart from small sections of fence on the Great Southern Stand wing every other structure at the MCG is new since the 1984 Grand Final. The oldest structures at the MCG (apart from those small bits of fence) are the light towers...

you see the peanut man - there is a perfect example of what's been removed - charachter. Why have a peanbut bloke' What does he add to the game/ Does he bring i any cash? can we make money of of him? No. Toss him out. The peanut man is a perfect example of the changing world.

he wouldn;t be able to toss bags into the crowd anymore anyway. What if he hit someone in the eye? Who would be libel?

Besides he might have dirty hands!

Ahhh I am glad i grew up when i did, things were different from each other then. Glenferrie was Glenferrie and Windy Hill was a bastard's paradise and a victory at victoria park was heaven on earth! Now, now everything needs to be shipped in, played, shipped out next!

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This type of slight is alien in the more cultured part of the world - Walsh. Its up there with mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun!

The AFL feel that the draft isn't working and have decided on a new model.

At the end of each season, the entire playing list of each 16 clubs will be spilled.

Then on Oct 1st, a raffle takes place to determine the picking order for each club.

Then they take it in turns to recruit their whole team - like the school yard cricket and footy days.

eg. Recruiter Team A --- I'll take Judd
Recruiter Team B --- I'll take Hall

and so on..

They think this might add excitement to the game....

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Isn't that what they do midseason (now!) in the NRL....?

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i actually agree - the draft and priority picks reward failure and leads to people like synbad and others to call for us to lose games.

I think the AFL has got it right in regards the "apprentice scheme" however clubs should be able to do that with any player they like and go back to the old zones that used to happen in football. A club can nature say 5 new players each year and use up 2 of them as a low draft pick i.e. R4 and R5 and those they dont use get released into the system at the Age of 18 or something and go into the "Draft Camp" like it is now.

Still have a salary cap - and make is so the AFL can ensure there are no dodgy dealings going on i.e. playing a kid at the age of 14 to move to a certain district so that he can be zoned etc..

So you would have

1. First Round Selection - 1-8 by ballet for the bottom eight, 9-16 by ballet for the top eight.
2. Second Round Selection - using the same position as you had the first round i.e. if you had the 3rd pick in the first round you would have the 19th pick in the second round
3. Third Round Selection - Father Son Rule or other player
4. Fourth Round Selection - Apprentice Pick 1 or other player
5. Fifth Round Selection - Apprentice Pick 2 or other player
6. as per round 2 if wanting to use this selection.

no Priority Pick and it should work on a lotto system. Those in the bottom eight go into a barrel and are drawn out in what order their selections will occur. Same goes for the top 8.

The exception to this is if a club over a 3 year cycle fails to win 15 games. Then that club gets the guaranteed 1st pick, however all the other clubs would get between 2-8.

At the moment the system they have inplace rewards failure and that is the shitest system ive ever heard of.

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Got to love the stare Down by Setanta on Llyod

I agree re the system encouraging tanking, but I think there are good points to it. There has always been a system for getting players. With zoning we had a brilliant zone, other clubs had ordinary zones, great for us, not for others. Also clubs without resources had little or no chance in the old days, again great for us, but not many other clubs. If we had of used our resources to be the best at the draft from the start (and given the talent we got from Bendigo we should have realised the potential was there to exploit the draft specially in the early days) we would have been more successful over the last 20 years and may not be having this conversation. I agree with the US NBA system of a lottery amongst lower clubs for picks and maybe a cumulative system for priority picks.

Look, I loved the old days with U19s and ressies, unlimited lists and stars coming down from the bush every year, topped up by a Buzz, or Syd Jackson etc. But I actually think drafting and salary cap saved about 4 or 5 teams from going under.

Also a genuine draft team hasn't yet won a flag. North were basically a pre draft team with many zone players from the U19s who'd come through, Adelaide were a concession team as were Port, Brissy had local zone players (Voss, Aker, keating) and Fitzroy amalgamation. Essendon* still had Misiti, Mercuri and others from local zone and several draft steals like Hird. Maybe this year if West Coast wins they'll be a genuine draft team.

We just need to be a whole lot better with the draft. I guess whatever system we have there will be some element of tanking, maybe the PP needs to be less attractive

Why not just use the NRL system. You have a salary cap. You cannot spend more than that on your players. You go and find your players as 15/16 year olds in the bush or at the elite schools or wherever. You bring them to your club on an apprenticeship scheme. Play them in U18 competition. Grow them into your club culture. Reward the smart recruiters.

Sure league has the fake anti-tampering deadline etc etc but what is so wrong with free agency, players just walking on a club at the end of their contract. They virtually do it now anyway.

Salary Cap good. Draft bad.

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I accept the fact that a lottery system cannot guarantee the last placed team will get first pick, thereby removing any desire for finishing last, but FFS, what happens if St Kilda finishes 9th and still gets pick #1.

I just don't think a lottery system is a fair distribution of draft picks. People complain of Melbourne exploiting the system with their yoyo years, and, while it cannot be guaranteed a lottery system provides clubs missing out on the finals, possibly by percentage only, an opportunity to get the first pick. That's a daft draft if you ask me.

I guess my position is based on the assumption that the draft exists, in part, to aid the provision of an even playing field, that is, the lower ranked teams get the higher ranked picks in order to catch the higher placed teams, and so the cycle continues.

I kinda think the zoning system is a bit of a simplistic approach in the context of a national game, and as pointed out, it could possibly have it's own inherent problems providing more benefit to one club over another, but if the AFL looked into it seriously I could see something like that working. However, if zoning was back in vogue IMO you'd need to go the whole hog, not have a quasi-zone quasi-draft hotch potch.

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Draft lottery and drafting age increased to 20.

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I am of a belief the draft should come into play over a 2-3 year period not over each year if a team over say 2 years win less than 8 they would qualify makes it much harder to tank over a 2-3 year period because it will only reward you if you are generally shite and wont benefit say a Melb that is finals one year 15 wins but then wins only 4 games next year over that 2 year period they would have total of 20 wins so no special PP or consessions. If then on the following year they then win only 4 games they may then qualify taking the next 2 years into account.

By doing it over a couple of years you would get less chance of tanking at seasons end and then only the really poor team which are just crap would benefit.

I tend to agree with camelboy.

In my opinion it's the Priority Pick that is the major influence.

Picks 1 & 2 or Picks 1 & 3 are so much more attractive to supporters (and probably the Club) than just the Pick 1.

Enough in fact to have even some of the strongest supporters hoping that we don't exceed the cut-off point for wins.

Not wanting your team to win even for long term gain just seems bizarre, ...........but totally logical under the present system.

I think we'd all prefer to watch a game "full-on" hoping for a win without that little seed of a "but if we win we lose long term" in the back of our mind

Agree with Lodsie.

Get rid of the priority pick. The desire for tanking wouldn't be nearly as great if the difference between winning one or two extra games was just going up one or two places in the draft (ie from 1st pick to second or third).

As it stands now the call for tanking is not to get a lower pick, it is to get an EXTRA pick, there is a huge difference.

Maybe consider having a priority pick after the first round (ie pick 17) and even then make it conditional on two bad years in a row.

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Number 17 - come on down!

i think the NBA lottery system for the top 10 picks is great...but then again....no one agrees with me...except those damn yanks....

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