2025 Pre-Season Analysis

 Here we are, as Queen once sung.  Born to be Kings, the Princes of our Universe.  The AFL season is a lot like the movie Highlander (1986).  I don’t mean it in the way that there is a Scottish guy playing a Spaniard-named Egyptian fellow who is culturally Japanese, while the American-born Frenchman plays the Scottish guy trying to behead the American guy who is Russian…that would be too simple.  I mean that “There Can Be Only One.”  Except when it is a draw.  But ultimately there really can be only one.  Still with me?

The off-season is almost at a close and what a ride it has been.  The cricket tests against India were less than convivial but very engaging.  Sinner lived up to his name but then was given a sentence so light that gravity couldn’t even capture it, and Trump was inaugurated heralding in an era of…I don’t know what.  Sadly, we lost a few past champions of the game, all within a day of each other.

The “Match Simulation” games have come to a close and as of tomorrow we can look at the real pre-season.  Remember when this was a proper tournament?  4 weeks of matches, a Grand Final and a chance at some silverware for North Melbourne?  People actually cared back then.  As it is, we watch with passing interest only to see if any of our teams stars get a season ending injury, thereby ending our teams season, not just theirs.  I was excited when I saw that one of the match simulations was going to be Brisbane vs Gold Coast vs Collingwood.  I tuned in hoping to see 54 players on the field, three sets of goals at the vertices of a huge equilateral triangle.  Just like we used to do when I was coaching the Auskick kids.  It’s manic, disastrous and the kids are utterly confused and neither the kids nor the coaches get any value from it at all.  But what a spectacle!!  Alas it was just three separate games…boring.

Most excitingly this year, Port Adelaide has already announced a succession plan, which history has taught us always goes spectacularly well 100% of the time.  This is fantastic news for columnists for the entire season who are now running a book on how quickly they can ruin it.  The current odds indicate a spectacular implosion by round 7.  Sydney did it a better way.  Big Cox just sucked the cerebral juices from John Longmire until, in a foggy-headed addle he walked into a presser called everyone a bunch of useless…things…and made his position untenable.  Which coach (besides Hinkley) will be first to go this year?

Anyway, as with last year, I took a look at the ladder to see who is going to win.  Needless to say, the statistical analysis and the science that went into it is completely infallible and you can expect nothing less than 100% accuracy in all the tips I do this year.  Did I also mention that I am modelling myself on Trump and only get my truth direct from Putin?  That is handy for you to know and backs up the veracity of my statements of fact.

Like the end of last season, I have broken the teams into a ladder showing the games they play against last year’s top 8 at home versus the middling team versus the bottom teams from last year’s final standings.  This is a helpful tool to understand how well a team might go.  I say ‘might’ because despite any advantages provided by the fixture, they still need to be good enough and if you’re really good enough you can overcome a disadvantageous draw.  For a refresher, the light green highlighting indicates slightly more advantageous than the average and a dark green tinge is a significant advantage.  The more green in a team’s row, the more advantageous their fixturing has been.  Balance that against how good the team actually is, and you have your winner.

Carlton won the most favour from the fixturists and Adelaide and Sydney again got a nice advantage.  North Melbourne have been so good recently that the AFL gave them the worst draw to try to curtail their winning ways and Essendon and St. Kilda also got the sharp end of the fixture stick.  I believe Collingwood got the honour of the hardest start playing 7 of last year’s top 8 in the first 8 games.  Meanwhile, special projects (Gold Coast) got the easiest start, not playing a top 8 team until round 7.  Essendon and Melbourne would like the look of theirs too.  As we know, momentum is a force stronger than the Quickening.

So, based on all of that, below is how I think the ladder will fall by the end of the home and away season.  If I get it 100% correct, I stand to win $100,000,000…at least as soon as I find a sponsor that is willing to stump up that kind of prize money.  Musk is already orchestrating his DOGE connections to clear the funding for me.

Why not submit your ladder?  We can compare and determine a winner who will receive as much money as Musk provides us.  Or at least the winner will hold some kind of imaginary power.

Good luck to your team this year.  I hope they win as many games as my own team, minus 1.  I’ll be back with a preview for Opening Round, or Round 0, or whatever it is called that the AFL has deemed worthy of continuing despite its unfairness and the sheer volume of complaints they received about it.  Will your team be reveling in success or reeling from the media pressure who will rule them out after any round 0/1 failure?

To quote The Kurgan from Highlander, “It’s better to Burn Out, than to Fade Away.”