2001: The AFL Draft Oddity

Why are teams increasingly trading experienced players for unproven draft picks? The answers all lie in the loaded 2001 AFL draft.

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With the dust settling from the AFL’s free agency period, the footy world turns their attention to the AFL draft and the exciting and unknown. With teams using free agency to trade more and more players for increasingly valuable picks, the casual fan must be asking the question why their team is trading known commodities, players that have gone through the grind of AFL footy, for the opportunity to select a player that is probably never going play a game of AFL footy?

The answer is surprisingly simple: The 2001 AFL draft.

In the earlier days of the AFL draft system, you could only count on a handful of players really leaving their mark on the game. Sure, you might completely fluke a draft pick that turns out to be one of the greatest players of all time (James Hird to Essendon with the 79th pick in a forgettable 1990 draft), but more often than not, you’re going to end up with a player that never saw the field at the top level and ends up dominating for the Bendigo Fire Ants (quite possibly a fictional team, but most likely not). 

More than 50% of all draftees never end up playing a single senior game. That’s just a cold hard fact. If you were a star player in high school, it’s probably something your career counsellor tried to tell you while you sat in her office thinking about how great it will be to go to Fabrique after playing AFL footy on Saturday afternoon. What they also should’ve told you at that stage is that whole drafting process was quite similar to the sadly missed tradition of collecting Scanlan Footy Cards back in the 80s: Grab a pack of players every year and hope you get a good one you can boast about. Chances are, you’re going to be a double and tossed into a bin. If you beat the odds and end up an AFL player, up until 2001, chances are you would play 50-100 games and then still end up at the Fire Ants. Tough break.

This is what makes the 2001 draft so unique, so wonderful and ultimately the twisted fantasy of all AFL list managers out there. Everything about this draft is solely responsible for why teams are coveting draft picks more than ever. The AFL is wholeheartedly embracing American professional sport’s (most notably, the NBA and NFL’s) obsession of hoarding ‘future’ shares over known commodities. This draft is the one exception that proves the rule. 

Check out the table below for proof that players simply do not last long in the AFL.

From 1998 – 2006, 62% of all players drafted never made it to the AFL level at all. Not one single second of top-tier football. Only 9% of all players drafted in that time had what you would consider a long career of 200 games or more. The AFL appears to chew you up, and spit you right back out again in the space of 1-2 years. In 2001, sure, 61% never made it to the AFL level, but of the remaining 39%, a very healthy majority made it to 100 games, and nearly 1/3 of those made it to 200 games (and counting). Longevity in this league isn’t always a measure of success, but it is a sign that these draftees were solid players that carved out long careers due to a combination of their inherent talent and physical abilities. A 12% chance of getting a player that stays in the league for 200 games are good odds that any team would take without hesitation. When you factor in the following numbers to what those players achieved, it becomes quite clear that getting players that have long careers is hard, but to replicate the level of individual and team accolades is also close to impossible.

6 Brownlow Medals.  6 Norm Smith Medals. 37 Grand Final Medals.

Those awards speak volumes to how much the players from this draft achieved during their playing careers.  While many drafts produce one or two players that will be remembered, even revered, by AFL fans and historians, the 2001 draft will be remembered for shaping an entire decade of the AFL competition. 

To use the language of American sports draft analysts, there were three ‘can’t miss, blue-chip, generation-defining franchise cornerstones’ that were so obviously the best talent in that draft that none of the three teams picking at those coveted spots (Hawthorn, St Kilda and West Coast) could possibly mess that up. There would be no repeat of the 1983 NBA draft, when Portland infamously took Sam Bowie over the greatest basketball player of all-time, Michael Jordan. And to make it even easier, the AFL is one of the few sports where you could simply take the most talented player available without so much as giving a second thought about positional need. It was just a matter of when these players would be selected. To nobody’s surprise, Luke Hodge went first overall to Hawthorn, Luke Ball next to St Kilda and finally Chris Judd to West Coast. Hodge and Judd will go down as two of the greatest to ever play the game, especially in the modern era, while Ball – despite not reaching the lofty heights of his peers – carved out a stellar career at St Kilda before finally winning a Premiership with Collingwood. Again, no surprises there. This is what you’d expect of the most hyped draft picks of the modern era. But it’s what happened after this that makes the 2001 draft truly crazy.

 

In the next 20-odd picks, Geelong managed to build an entire team by picking up Jimmy Bartel (8th), James Kelly (17th) and Stevie Johnson (24th). St Kilda, after picking Ball, recruited Nick Dal Santo (13th). That does not even include the fact they also managed to find Leigh Montagna at a lowly 37th (or trading for Jason Gram, the 19th pick in that draft, from Brisbane 2 years later). That run of selections by those clubs set up two of the strongest sides of the mid-to-late 2000s. Having one club turn its fortunes around in a single draft is pretty impressive, but for 2 clubs to do the same? That’s incredible. Where it goes absolutely off the charts is what happened later on in that same draft.

From pick 30 onwards, there were definite star players that had long and impactful careers. Sam Mitchell, Brian Lake, Andrew Welsh, Jarrad Waite and Adam Schneider had great careers by any standard in the AFL. Absolute steals at such a low number. But two players picked at the lower end of the draft were the ones that changed draft strategy forever.

Gary Ablett Jr and Dane Swan will go down in AFL history as two of the best players of the modern era, with Ablett making a case as one of the greatest players of all time. Ablett was picked with the AFL’s curious father/son rule at number 40, while Dane Swan fell all the way to 58th. Both followed similar career arcs early in their career, with doubts about their ability and future in the league. While the top three were immediate impact players, Ablett and Swan had years of growing pains before both setting the competition on fire from 2009 onwards. Ablett took out the Brownlow in 2009 while Swan grabbed the 2011 Brownlow with a record-setting 34 votes. Five of the top seven vote-getters in the 2010 draft were from that same 2001 draft. The amount of Brownlow Medals won by this elite class will be a record that will probably never be broken, but the truly astonishing fact is that from 2004 (Chris Judd’s first Brownlow at West Coast) until 2015, at least one player from this draft class has featured in the top 10 of Brownlow votes ever single year. More often than not, a player from this draft would either win or feature in the top 3 of vote-getters. When that level of success is established and maintained for over a decade, it’s easy to forget just how truly difficult it was to achieve, as their success becomes the norm rather than the exception.  

Maybe we will have another draft that matches half of what the 2001 draft achieved. The recent 2012 draft already has produced some star players in Jake Stringer, Ollie Wines and Jack Viney but will the 2015 draft be the second coming of “the draft”? AFL clubs are all hoping that it does, but chances are it’s going to end up with a whole heap of players destined for the lower and suburban leagues and maybe a handful of 200-gamers. Even though the odds are completely stacked against the clubs, that allure and magic that will always surround the 2001 draft will take over and the hopes of every club will once again come down to the one-day crapshoot that is the AFL draft. Good luck. 

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