18 Clubs, 19 Winners
The umpires might not look at the stats for the Brownlow, but it seems the coaches certainly do when they vote for the best and fairest.
As the AFL moves into the off-season each of the 18 clubs holds their best and fairest night, recognising the performance of their players over the course of the year.
This season saw 19 players named as club champions, where medals are typically named after individuals who have made significant contributions to the club during their career.
Adelaide’s Jordan Dawson and Ben Keays became the first players in the club’s history to share the Malcolm Blight Medal, but the two winners are symbolic of the trend seen across the league with respect to first-time and repeat winners.
Keays, who started his career at the Lions before moving to the Crows, was one of ten first-time best and fairest winners, along with Nick Daicos (Collingwood), Max Holmes (Geelong), Jesse Hogan (Greater Western Sydney), Jai Newcombe (Hawthorn), Luke Davies-Uniacke (North Melbourne), Daniel Rioli (Richmond), Callum Wilkie (St Kilda), Isaac Heeney (Sydney), and Jeremy McGovern (West Coast).
There are several incredible stories among the nine first-time winners, a mix of players claiming what I imagine to be the first of many such awards and those finally getting recognition for their long (and sometimes difficult) careers.
Daicos, who claimed the E.W. Copeland Trophy, joined his dad Peter (1982, 1988) and older brother Nick (2023) as a club best and fairest winner in a year where he finished second in the Brownlow, became a two-time All-Australian, and won the AFL Coaches Association Champion Player of the Year. This was the fifth time in V/AFL history a set of brothers had won consecutive best and fairest awards at the same club.
Holmes took home his first ‘Carji’ Greeves Medal after receiving votes in 22 of Geelong’s 25 games this season, averaging more than 24 disposals and 560 meters per game as the Cats made another preliminary final.
Hogan, this season’s Coleman Medallist, claimed his first Kevin Sheedy Medal in his tenth season (fourth as a Giant), after battling injuries and personal challenges earlier in his career at Melbourne and Fremantle.
Newcombe, who joined Hawthorn as a mid-season rookie draft selection in 2021, won his first Peter Crimmins Medal after playing every game in the Hawk’s incredible semi-final run, averaging 24.8 disposals and 4.4 tackles. Newcombe had finished runner-up in 2022 and 2023.
In a similar vein, Wilkie earned his first Trevor Barker Award as the Saints’ best and fairest after being drafted as a mature-age rookie in 2018 and placing second in each of the two previous counts. The former accountant has played 132 consecutive games since being drafted, a club record for the men from Moorabbin.
McGovern was named the John Worsfold Medallist for the first time in his 11-year career, despite missing four games in the second half of the season due to lung, rib, and thumb injuries. The five-time All-Australian’s best finish prior to this year had been second place back in 2017.
On the other side of things, Dawson, the Crows’ skipper, became a multiple best and fairest winner after his previous victory in 2023, along with Lachie Neale (Brisbane Lions; 4), Patrick Cripps (Carlton; 5), Zach Merrett (Essendon; 5), Caleb Serong (Fremantle; 2), Sam Collins (Gold Coast; 2), Jack Viney (Melbourne; 2) Zak Butters (Port Adelaide; 2), Marcus Bontempelli (Western Bulldogs; 6).
There are also plenty of great stories coming from this latter group of ten. Neale claimed his fourth Merrett-Murray Medal, joining the two Doig Medals he won during his time at Fremantle.
Cripps joined Carlton legend John Nicholls, the medal’s namesake, as the only five-time best and fairest winner in the club’s history, adding to his previous wins in 2015, 2018, 2019, and 2022.
Merrett became the fourth player to win five or more Crichton Medals, with this year’s victory putting him level with club legend James Hird, one ahead of past greatest Tim Watson and Simon Madden but two behind Dick Reynolds and Bill Hutchinson.
In a win for the defenders, Collins added to a second Club Champion award to his name after claiming his first title in 2020. Collins joins Gary Ablett Jnr (four), Tom Lynch (two), and Touk Miller (two) as a multiple winner. He also finished as runner-up in last year’s count.
One of the things I find interesting about the best and fairests is the huge variety in how clubs award votes after each match.
Some are relatively simple, like at Adelaide, where the coaches give each player a rating from 0-10 after each game.
Others, like Collingwood, are more complicated. Each member of the Magpies’ four-man coaching group allocates between zero and four votes to each player on four different categories (pressure, fight, territory, and role/impact) after each game, meaning a player can receive up to 64 votes each round.
The different approaches to awarding Brownlow votes results in some strange final tallies when comparing the winners, as seen in the table below.
The recent discussions about whether umpires should have access to the statistics when awarding Brownlow votes after Cripps won his second medal last month made me wonder about how well the club best and fairest votes aligned with the AFL’s player rating points, which Champion Data describe as the “most definitive number to define influence on matches”.
Unlike the umpires, coaches have access to a constant stream of statistics before, during, and after the games, so there is a much greater chance the various coaching staff who vote on a club’s best and fairest would consider these when sitting down after each game to allocate votes.
We can get around the issue of clubs using different voting methods by using Z-score normalisation for the top 10 vote getters at each club. In this process we look at how close each individual value is to the average of the dataset. If a value is lower than the average (like the number of votes the player who finished tenth received), the normalised value will be a negative number, and if a value is higher than the average (such as the number of votes the winner received) the normalised value will be a positive number.
Plotting the normalised best and fairest votes against each player’s rating point total reveals a rather obvious (unsurprising) trend: the higher a player polled in the B&F count, the higher their overall rating point total.
If we filter things so that we only get the 19 winners, we can see how they are grouped nicely together, with a positive normalised vote value.
There’s also one (non-winning) player that I’ve highlighted in the figure below because they stick out somewhat: Jackson Archer.
Archer, who finished tenth in the Kangaroos’ count, had the lowest rating points total for any player finishing in their club’s top 10 (61.4 rating points, making him the 26th ranked player at the club according to his total). The second-lowest rating points total (Ben Long, 125.8 points, eighth in the Suns’ best and fairest) was more than double that of Archer’s.
This suggests that the coaches at North Melbourne saw (and valued) something in Archer’s 15 games this season that isn’t captured by the rating points metric.
Archer wasn’t the only one to perform above his rating point total in the best and fairest count.
Max Michalanney finished fourth in Adelaide’s best and despite being the 17th ranked player in terms of rating point total (125.8), Harrison Jones finished tenth in Essendon’s best and fairest (ranked 16th in rating points), while Oliver Henry (eighth in Geelong’s best and fairest, the 19th ranked player), Toby Bedford (equal eighth in GWS’ best and fairest, ranked 17th for ratings points), Jack Ginnivan (ninth in Hawthorn’s count, ranked 16th for rating points) were also among players who were judged higher by the coaches than what the statistics suggest.
On the other end of the spectrum, Brisbane’s Oscar McInerney was equal tenth in the best and fairest count but was ranked fourth from a rating point perspective, Massimo D’Ambrosio was tenth in the count despite being the fifth ranked player, and Tim Kelly finished tenth in the Eagles’ count despite being ranked their second most impactful player according to the ratings points.
Similarly, the best and fairest winner didn’t always have the highest rating points total. Only 11 of the 19 winners were also the top-rated player for their club over the course of the season.
The remaining eight winners were no slouches, however, with the lowest ranked player in terms of rating points being sixth:
Ben Keays – 6th (242.5 rating points)
Sam Collins – 4th (308.0 rating points)
Jesse Hogan – 3rd (300.4 rating points)
Jack Viney – 2nd (275.0 rating points)
Luke Davies-Uniacke – 2nd (354.2 rating points)
Daniel Rioli – 2nd (266.8 rating points)
Callum Wilke – 4th (264.5 rating points)
Jeremy McGovern – 3rd (245.3 rating points)
The top 10 finishers in each club’s best and fairest count, along with their vote total, rating points total, and rating points rank, can be seen here.
The timeframe of this stat is limited based on what data are freely/easily available and/or accessible. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you spot any errors in what I have presented.
Nice one, Lincoln. Small thing I noticed: you said Newcombe was taken in the 2019 MSD, it was actually 2021. That's looking like the strongest MSD ever because a bunch of talented Victorian kids had their 2020 seasons impacted by Covid.