PHEW, what a relief! Just when it seemed we were going to be deprived of wacky ideas from the world of AFL coaching with the exit of Kevin Sheedy, up bobs Mark Williams as heir apparent in stunning fashion.
The Port Adelaide boss already has coached a premiership side. And he's got to be a hot favourite now for the 2008 "You've got to be kiddin' " flag with his plan to turn the final eight into a final 12.
He's serious, too. The "Guthrie-Williams finals system" developed by Williams and a software designer mate, Rex Guthrie, has been submitted to the AFL as a PowerPoint presentation.
It's a mouthful of a title, like cricket's Duckworth-Lewis system. But at least there was a sound rationale to the cricket boffins' mind-numbing theorising. What on earth does this proposed tampering with a good finals system achieve, other than to completely devalue the home-and-away season that precedes it?
Remembering that the Williams proposal was drafted before the recent talk of an 18-team competition within the next five years, it means he advocates that three-quarters of the AFL play off for a premiership each September. Gee, that raises the bar.
So we spend 22 rounds and 176 games eliminating only four of 16 teams, and four weeks whittling a dozen teams down to one. Just a little imbalanced?
Williams says his proposal will reward properly the top two teams on the home-and-away ladder because after their first week off in the four-week finals series, they will face teams that might have finished as low as 12th.
Proper reward? Doesn't it just mean that after week one, that 12th-placed team is theoretically as close to a grand final as the top team?
Two seasons ago, that might have meant West Coast (17 wins) meeting Port Adelaide (only eight wins) in a week-two knockout final. A fair reward for more than twice as many victories?
Port won one-third of its regular-season matches but somehow would have been only two wins from a grand final berth. There's rewarding mediocrity. Then there's plain farce.
Williams' most favoured of the five final-12 versions he has submitted in week one has teams No. 5 and No. 6 playing off, teams No. 7 and 8, nine versus 10 and 11 versus 12. One of those 11th- and 12th-placed sides is guaranteed survival into week two, while either fifth or sixth is eliminated.
And all this is apparently to assist teams finishing higher up the ladder.
Williams argues that since the 2000 revamp of the final eight, the top two haven't fared that well. He'd know. Three of the eight grand finals since then have been contested by the top two. Of the five which haven't, his Port Adelaide fluffed its top-two advantage twice, and local rival the Crows also twice. Perhaps it's a South Australian thing.
What he doesn't mention is that every single premiership play-off since 2000 has involved two teams that finished in the top four.
That's unlike 1998, when Adelaide finished the home-and-away rounds fifth with only 13 wins, got belted in its first final, yet was still able to pinch a flag. Or 1999, when Carlton finished sixth with 12 wins, lost its first final by 73 points, and still made it to grand final day.
Neither scenario could happen now, and nor should it. Essendon, the Brisbane Lions, Williams' Port Adelaide, Sydney, West Coast and Geelong all have been very deserving premiers since the turn of the millennium. The current system consistently rewards the best-performed teams of the season.
At the very least, it ensures that over six months and 22 rounds of slog, teams have to aspire to something a little greater than merely avoiding the bottom four.
Williams is a man full of ideas. Most of them are shrewd. This one isn't, other than to make even the wild and wacky Sheedy look conservative by comparison.
