St Kilda President Andrew Bassat tees off on the AFL draft system, specifically father/son and the Northern Academies

[bergholt]

I understand the lottery of father son and how that effects equalisation but I don't get the claim of how this unfairly targets a club like St Kilda. Perhaps I'm missing something

He's the St Kilda president but he's raising it on behalf of the whole comp.

But also, the more historically successful a club is, the more 100 gamers it has, the more chance it has at eligible sons, the more chance one of them will be good. The Saints have been historically unsuccessful so yeah, we're pushing shit uphill.

 

[Nvent]

I understand the lottery of father son and how that effects equalisation but I don't get the claim of how this unfairly targets a club like St Kilda. Perhaps I'm missing something

Well what do StKilda have as a drawing point? Geelong themselves have the go home factor and the uniqueness of living the Geelong lifestyle.

 

[bergholt]

Congrats on getting lucky when you were being handed priority draft picks every year. How far are we going back?

Priority draft picks were (and still should be) a core part of equalisation. Equalisation means if you're worse, you get given more chances to get better. Your pick of Heeney was a direct undermining of equalisation.

Again, if you're against equalisation feel free to just come out and say it. But you can't have it both ways.

 

[Bluelegs]

Every club has access to F/S selections.

It's the house rules Free Parking of the AFL.

I like the sentimentality of it but the draft has become so compromised in so many different ways.

Next year is looking like a total mess with the combination of academies, NGAs and F/S at the top end.

 

[JPetro83]

I understand the lottery of father son and how that effects equalisation but I don't get the claim of how this unfairly targets a club like St Kilda. Perhaps I'm missing something

It might come back to haunt him one day if Nick Reiwoldts boys or Lenny Hayes kids etc turn into guns and end up elsewhere.. but like you said its a lottery

 

[Bunk Moreland]

He's partially deaf.

Fair enough

It’s an incredible accent in that case!

 

[DT_35]

You realise Brisbane getting Levi Ashcroft is as a result of the father son rule available to all clubs though right? Like I can accept academies are random and can be unevenly distributed but you can’t use that argument for father sons, surely.

…..speaking of random

 

[joe444]

Bring back zones. Geelong would never lose a game again.

He's got a point. All this bundling of picks / points etc has got silly. Academies are important, but should be administered by the AFL on behalf of the game in general. And people suggesting hypocrisy don't get it. You don't have to be outside the system to disagree with it.

 

[Xtreme]

The St Kilda president needs to drink a nice tall glass of harden up juice.

 

[LordLucifer]

The Saints didn't complain when they benefitted from players wanting to return to Victoria. So no the system is not setup to keep you down St.Kilda, you guys do that yourself by poor list management & club management.

This is it in a nutshell !!

St.Blunda have been a cellar dweller club for all of its existence, they make mistake after mistake after mistake but lo & behold, its always someone elses fault.

Pointing the finger at the F/S rule because their players are all having daughters is utterly absurd, may as well ring up god and see if he can fix that for them.

They are always first in the queue for the welfare handouts, have no success to talk about and are perenially run by complete nuff-nuffs.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, its time the AFL shuffled this rabble off to another state permanently. Give them some draft assistance & a bit of COLA for doing so and then leave them to their own devices.

If they blow all of the welfare assistance given to them and find themselves back in the spiral of diminishing returns again, then just wind them up for good.

They are a blight on the competition and always have been to such an extent that non-Saints fans are growing extremnely sick & tired of these annual sook-up woe-is-me's.

 

[MysticChameleon]

Of course it is! That's exactly the point. If you want a player like Naicos (who everyone could see was going to be at least very very good) then you pay through the nose. As it stands, he cost almost nothing relative to his likelihood of succeeding.

Didn't we finish 17th the year we got Naicos, I realise we'd traded our pick away to GWS but just in terms of being down the bottom it wasn't that much of a stretch for the second worst team to end up with a top 5 draft player.

And great as he's become, at the time he was considered behind Darcy and Horne-Francis by most recruiters. It's only with hindsight - us winning a premiership and Naicos developing to be even better than expected - that people call this out as being unfair. Collingwood's had plenty of misses with fs picks too, but they're less interesting to talk about.

 

[caloschwaby]

It’s unfair because the benefits of the system are random and unevenly distributed.

Semantically, something cannot be unfair if it's random. Randomness is fair because it has no bias - it is random. Sure the results can be unevenly distributed, but unfairness implies the dice have been weighted - they haven't. Even club bar GC/GWS has had access to the randomness of F/S selections as soon as a father's first kid turns 18.

Agreed that discounts should be looked at as the main benefit of F/S should just be the ability to access a player that you otherwise wouldn't have given the picks you have available due to finishing Top 8 or so.

Feel like the AFL used all their black magic keeping St Kilda in the league from the shaky late 80s/90s that their luck in the F/S department hasn't quite hit in the modern era.

 

[Nvent]

This is it in a nutshell !!

St.Blunda have been a cellar dweller club for all of its existence, they make mistake after mistake after mistake but lo & behold, its always someone elses fault.

Pointing the finger at the F/S rule because their players are all having daughters is utterly absurd, may as well ring up god and see if he can fix that for them.

They are always first in the queue for the welfare handouts, have no success to talk about and are perenially run by complete nuff-nuffs.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, its time the AFL shuffled this rabble off to another state permanently. Give them some draft assistance & a bit of COLA for doing so and then leave them to their own devices.

If they blow all of the welfare assistance given to them and find themselves back in the spiral of diminishing returns again, then just wind them up for good.

They are a blight on the competition and always have been to such an extent that non-Saints fans are growing extremnely sick & tired of these annual sook-up woe-is-me's.

They've never cheated though.

 

[CakeEater]

Haven’t the Dogs won a flag in the last 8 years? What advantages do we have that aren’t available to the Saints? Do they have a zone/academy area? Are their former players not capable of having children?

Umpires giving you freekicks and a flag.

Just ask Plugger.

 

[Nvent]

Didn't we finish 17th the year we got Naicos, I realise we'd traded our pick away to GWS but just in terms of being down the bottom it wasn't that much of a stretch for the second worst team to end up with a top 5 draft player.

And great as he's become, at the time he was considered behind Darcy and Horne-Francis by most recruiters. It's only with hindsight - us winning a premiership and Naicos developing to be even better than expected - that people call this out as being unfair. Collingwood's had plenty of misses with fs picks too, but they're less interesting to talk about.

That's another stuff up though. Trade your first pick and get access to a gun with a handful of garbage picks.

 

[GoEaglesGoSGIO]

Making excuses to feed the fan base.

How come Hawthorn is so fricken good all the time?

Umm because they had access to priorirty picks, which got them ahead, which then got scratched after they had benefited the most from it?

Id like to see how Hawks went if you take Lance Franklin out of the clubs history.... He single handidly defined 10+ years of that clubs success.

 

[BIGHAWK23]

Umm because they had access to priorirty picks, which got them ahead, which then got scratched after they had benefited the most from it?

Id like to see how Hawks went if you take Lance Franklin out of the clubs history.... He single handidly defined 10+ years of that clubs success.

Lance Franklin wasn't a priority pick

Weird point

 

[Pistol Night]

Umm because they had access to priorirty picks, which got them ahead, which then got scratched after they had benefited the most from it?

Id like to see how Hawks went if you take Lance Franklin out of the clubs history.... He single handidly defined 10+ years of that clubs success.

They improved after he left

 

[LordLucifer]

They've never cheated though.

Rather irrelevant comment to the discussion but thanks for making it.

 

[caloschwaby]

What would inevitably happen if F/S system is neutered out of existence:
1. Gun player drafted by one of GC/North/Stk/another club with recent history of poor list management
2. Play out their rookie contract, finishing no higher than 12th while playing for the team
3. Request trade to their father's club
4. Club gets bounty of picks for the acquisition
5. See Step #1

F/S just cutting out the middle-man and getting everybody to where they want to go!

 

[bergholt]

Semantically, something cannot be unfair if it's random. Randomness is fair because it has no bias - it is random. Sure the results can be unevenly distributed, but unfairness implies the dice have been weighted - they haven't. Even club bar GC/GWS has had access to the randomness of F/S selections as soon as a father's first kid turns 18.

Semantically, fairness can refer either to the process or the outcome. Clearly I was talking about the outcome.

But also, because of historical differences in the number of 100 gamers (which I posted earlier), the process is also biased in particular ways which are not perfectly fair.

 

[bergholt]

What would inevitably happen if F/S system is neutered out of existence:
1. Gun player drafted by one of GC/North/Stk/another club with recent history of poor list management
2. Play out their rookie contract, finishing no higher than 12th while playing for the team
3. Request trade to their father's club
4. Club gets bounty of picks for the acquisition
5. See Step #1

F/S just cutting out the middle-man and getting everybody to where they want to go!

...except that in your system the selling club gets picks. In the current system they just get their pick pushed back down the order of the draft.

 

[Bald]

Of course they're responsible, that's completely the point! We were unsuccessful in that period and so ended up with fewer 100 gamers. So are you saying that we should then be condemned to lack of success forever because that cycle will never end?

Of course not - but to suggest St Kilda's lack of success is due to their lack of academy or father sons is just a nonsense. You can win the premiership without them. Richmond and Hawthorn have won 6 of the last 12 premierships and neither (from memory) had a massive number of father son or academy players on their list.

Ross Lyon is saying that the AFL would be doing the right thing if the draft was compromised heavily due to Josh Battle leaving, but then Bassat is talking about the inequalities in the draft, I just don't think you can demand that a flawed system benefit you in one area, whilst demanding change in another.

 

[Nvent]

What would inevitably happen if F/S system is neutered out of existence:
1. Gun player drafted by one of GC/North/Stk/another club with recent history of poor list management
2. Play out their rookie contract, finishing no higher than 12th while playing for the team
3. Request trade to their father's club
4. Club gets bounty of picks for the acquisition
5. See Step #1

F/S just cutting out the middle-man and getting everybody to where they want to go!

Brisbanes best forward was a father son they bought in. Clearly the romance of playing at your fathers club isn't that important.

 

[jakson68]

That's another stuff up though. Trade your first pick and get access to a gun with a handful of garbage picks.

Did you not see the players you landed last year with junk picks?