A club might sneak into the eight on the back of a charitable draw, but you don't win the flag from seventh or eighth. Since the advent of the final eight, only once has a club won the premiership from outside the top four.
In 1998, the Adelaide Crows stormed from fifth to purloin their second premiership, despite getting obliterated by Melbourne in the first week of the finals.
That the Crows paid no penalty for losing their first final was a serious anomaly that the AFL eventually rectified; that premiership result was influenced not by a questionable draw but a flawed finals system.
A decade later, we have another anomaly that demands reform. This year, the draw has been fixed so that teams frequently play one another twice before they meet others once. Every club plays at least one team twice before round 16.
The AFL has confirmed that it will review this new, heavily compromised schedule, which is best described as "the round-15 raffle". The draw should return to the fairer system wherein everyone played each other once from rounds 1-15, then met seven teams for a second time.
The most celebrated oddity of this weird new schedule is that Geelong does not play its putative challenger Hawthorn until round 17. No less significant is the fact that the Cats don't play the Western Bulldogs, who have supplanted Hawthorn in second spot, until round 16.
Far from being handicapped after their premiership, the Cats have been handed what has turned out to be a very friendly schedule. They will end up playing two clubs in the current bottom four — Port Adelaide and Fremantle — twice each before they play their nearest ladder competitors in rounds 16 and 17.
Indeed, each of the top four clubs have fared well in the round-15 raffle. Hawthorn played Melbourne, the bottom team, twice in the first nine rounds. The Hawks played the Demons, Adelaide and North Melbourne twice before Sydney (round 15) and Geelong (round 17).
When Sydney fans eyed off the draw in March, they would have been concerned to see that they'd copped Port Adelaide (second in 2007) and West Coast (fifth), plus St Kilda, 2008's false March champions, all twice within the first 13 rounds. Ouch.
Draws can only be assessed in retrospect, though, and the Swans have a winning ticket in the lottery — they're 4-0 versus a pathetic West Coast (15th) and ailing Port (13th), and 1-1 versus the overrated Saints.
They're entrenched in fourth spot, without having beaten a premiership contender (they've played only Geelong and the Doggies once each and lost).
Sydney has a nasty run home henceforth, playing Collingwood twice, Hawthorn, Geelong, the Bulldogs and Brisbane in the last nine games. Overall, its draw isn't soft. The issue is that the ladder is shaped far more by what occurs in the first two-thirds of the home-and-away season.
Melbourne, meanwhile, received a vicious draw: Hawthorn, the Bulldogs and Brisbane (which it beat!) twice each in the first 15 games.
By rounds 16 and 17, there's a race to the bottom for draft picks, teams have given up on finals and orthopedic surgeries are overflowing. The ladder is pretty much sorted, and what does change isn't of much importance.
The old system worked for that very reason — the ladder was more or less settled by the time the draw became a factor in round 16.
The AFL has tried the round-15 raffle in the name of the great god of commerce and to eliminate other perennial gripes, such as excessive six-day breaks, back-to-back travel and to meet the clubs' conflicting commercial demands.
One can see the rationale for the raffle but how about this argument against: first and foremost, before its business and missionary objectives, the AFL is still a football competition.
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