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- #51
Apparently finals are about what Dan says they're about. Despite what's actually going on in the real world.
This is what happens when you start with a false premise - ie: That a double chance is supposed to exist outside of its context. That's what's behind all this manic raving about Geelong and St Kilda not having a double chance due to winning in the first week.
It's really very simple. The advantage the top four have is that if they win they get a week off, and if they lose they get to play again. As opposed to the rest of the finallists, who are playing for survival. That fact is so simple I can't understand why Dan can't grasp it.
Which brings us to the second false premise: That the double chance is wrong. If something is wrong, then it ought to be demonstrably wrong. That is, you ought to be able to point out where it fails in practice. What I see is a finals system that in ten years:
*Has yet to produce a flag winner from outside the top three teams
*Has only twice produced a grand finallist outside of the top three
*In 5 out of 10 cases - including the past three years in a row - has had 1 vs 2 in the Grand Final.
*Only twice has seen a team outside the top four made the Prelims.
Why would you even think about changing a finals system with that sort of consistency? There's enough variety to suggest a team finishing 3rd has a shot at it, or that a team finishing 4th might make the last day; but it generally produces a winner from the top two. That's as it should be.
Roger, there are plenty of other ways to give the top teams an advantage over the lower teams. The NFL gives 4 teams an advantage over the other 8 in the play-offs. And it doesn't use double chances to do this.
The problem is our system is basically the same as the NFL sysem from our second week onwards. It's basically a knockout system anyway. The GF is knockout, the PF is knockout. Why not just make the whole damn thing knockout as it should be? Like I've been saying 1st and 2nd can be eliminated after one loss anyway CURRENTLY, so the whole system should be knockout.
No other country in the world has a system that concludes with a knockout Grand Final and Preliminary Finals (like ours) but then strangely reverts back to a double chance system earlier in the play-off system.
The old Argus final-4 system was interesting because the top team got a second chance if they lost their semi-final. But they also got a second chance if they lost the Grand Final. The double chance existed all the way through. That, at least, is consistent.
The double chance currently only exists in the first week. Either it must exist all the way through (like the Argus system) OR not at all.
We all seem to like the drama, tension, excitement that knockout brings. It's what finals are about, surely you agree. So I say don't have it at all.
Double chances lack drama. Basically they totally suck, and go against the "perform on the day" principle of what finals are about. They are an abhorrent disgrace and should never have been brought in back in 1931. People have got used to them and accepted them because it's all they know. Humans are creatures of habit after all. And let's face it a lot of people are pretty stupid and can't think for themselves. That's harsh I know, but it's true.