AFL priority picks, loved by struggling clubs so much they are seemingly prepared to sacrifice short-term pain for long-term gain to achieve them, could be phased out.
While the league vehemently rejects the suggestion that AFL teams would not seek to win if they could gain priority picks, it believes the draft structure itself will soon become sufficient for such picks to be scrapped.
AFL football operations manager Adrian Anderson said the removal was likely to occur once the draft system had been in place so long that every player had come to the game through it.
"Once the industry feels confident that the draft itself provides a sufficient mechanism to rebuild, then the priority picks may go," Anderson said.
"I think ideally you would not have any need for priority picks because in the long term we get to a situation that the draft order itself provides sufficient assistance to teams to rebuild.
"We have recently changed it to make it harder to get a priority pick, and it may be there will come a time when the competition feels there is no need for the priority pick rule.
"We looked at this last year and the clubs still strongly supported the retention of a priority pick, but equally felt that the changes which we eventually introduced needed to be made.
"We are almost to the point where every player has come through the draft system; very few players in the game now arrived before the draft system."
The AFL changed eligibility rules this season to require clubs to win four games or fewer (down from five) in one season in order to be given a priority pick at the end of the first round of the national draft.
Consecutive poor years would be offset by a compensatory pick at the start of the draft.
AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou yesterday laughed off as an annual circus the suggestion of sides lying down for draft picks.
"I set my clock … with about eight weeks to go, it's around teams tanking," Demetriou said.
"I say to you and I say to the supporters, if anybody thinks that the panacea for success is getting the first draft pick, they're kidding themselves — they are just absolutely kidding themselves.
"There's so many things that go into making a good football club. And you know what, at the end of it, if people are thinking out there that it's good for clubs to lose games, there are peoples' livelihoods that rest on this. Coaches lose their jobs … it just doesn't make any sense.
"It's a nonsensical argument that gets a run and the sooner we stop talking about it and adding this farcical situation to the competition the better."
Anderson said the industry countenanced further changes at the end of last year including introducing a lottery for the bottom and top half of the eight to determine draft placement and therefore remove any incentive for poor performance.
There was also a suggestion to determine draft picks on the ladder at the end of round 15 once all sides had played one another and again remove the perception that there was a greater benefit in losing the final rounds.
"'There was very little support for the policy of a lottery of the bottom positions.
"It was considered unfair for a side that finished ninth and narrowly missed the eight to potentially get the No. 1 pick and the bottom side that barely won a game to potentially get pick nine," he said.
There was also little support for the draft based on the round-15 ladder.
