In my last post I looked at the statistics from previous years from the WAFL competition, so it follows suit that the South Australian National Football League should also throw up some important numbers from this year’s draftee class. (more…)

One of the hidden tasks that hardcore fantasy coaches perform as an offseason ritual is to pore over statistics from prior seasons by newly drafted AFL players from back when they were playing in feeder competitions. Given the preponderance of players drafted from the Western Australian Football League to the AFL in recent drafts, it could be highly fruitful to sift through the numbers to look for next year’s bolters. (more…)

It hasn’t taken long for the first big injury news to hit 2009 fantasy teams… it’s barely even November 2008! Matthew Egan is now considering retirement after getting bad news from a specialist in Sydney about the foot he broke in round 22 of 2007. (more…)

I’ve been assuming for the purposes of the Fanplanner feature on FanFooty that draftees and rookies playing their first game of senior AFL football are going to score 50 fantasy points… let’s look at some historical data to see if that’s true. (more…)

As Barack Obama prepares to take over as the next US President from George W. Bush, there are a few more power shifts on the minds of fantasy coaches this off-season, with older players looking like they will give up their spots in the senior 22 to younger upstarts… with a few at the Power! (more…)

Sometimes you can congratulate yourself for zigging when others are zagging when it comes to fantasy footy, be it though luck or good planning… or a bit of both. (more…)

Fantasy coaches look at the AFL draw a little differently to normal football fans. We don’t particularly care about how many interstate trips each team gets, whether they start with a home game or how many times we have to play at the new Jihad (sorry, Etihad) Stadium. For 2009, what we were most worried about was round 1: were the AFL going to schedule two Thursday night games to kick off the season as they did last year starting at 6.10pm AEST, which in conjunction with the 5pm cutoff for round 1 teams to be published led to the now-infamous 70 minutes of madness?

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A rather underwhelming trade week is over for 2008, with only six trades made. Let’s go through each of them and look for value in the manner of Jordan McMahon, Martin Mattner and Brad Symes from this year. (more…)

The Eagles are one of the teams I expect to see using the cluster to great advantage, especially in playing against it. Subiaco is not all that suited to the cluster due to the wide wings, and the Eagles historically have had no problem playing that chip-chip game spotting up leading targets along the wings in home games so it shouldn’t hold that many fears for them. I was disappointed that the Eagles couldn’t continue their 400-possession-per-game style this year but I expect them to get somewhere near that again next year - not necessarily winning a lot of those games, but certainly embracing the new high-possession norm with open arms. (more…)

This has to be the most disappointing team of 2008 for me. Flying at 15 and 1 or something ridiculous when they played the Cats, then copped one bad quarter in that game and didn’t give a yelp for the rest of the season. Serious issues in their leadership group, I think. All that crap with rebuking Aker for being Aker, that didn’t sit right with me. It was amazing how they all dropped their heads after that one quarter and gave up on the season, just about. (more…)