2024 Brownlow Medal Preview
Is winning “Charlie” more about quantity or quality?
Tonight, the AFL will award The Brownlow Medal – the highest individual accolade in the game – to the player that the umpires have deemed to have been the fairest and best over the course of the home and away season.
Some years the Brownlow race is quite open, with a number of players who could potentially win the count.
That is not the case this year, however, with most predictors having either Carlton skipper Patrick Cripps and/or Collingwood young gun Nick Daicos winning the Brownlow Medal for 2024.
The AFL have Cripps and Daicos tying on 33 votes, while SuperFooty, Triple M, and Wheelo Ratings have Daicos topping the count (with 37, 36, and 34.4 votes, respectively.
In contrast, ESPN, Champion Data, Stats Insider, and the Monte ChaRlo Model have Cripps winning his second Brownlow, predicting he will poll 34, 28.3, 32.8, and 34.4 votes.
Looking at these different predictors and hearing the media discuss how many games a player will poll votes in (particularly the highly desirable three vote games) got me thinking about whether winning “Charlie” is more about quantity or quality.
That is, does the eventual winner poll in a greater number of games over the course of the season, or do poll less frequently but are always the best on ground when they do?
Let’s find out.
How many games can you miss and still win the Brownlow?
AFL Tables has round-by-round vote data for all players since 1984, so we can look at how winners over the past 40 years have performed.
First, let’s look at how many games each Brownlow Medallist played that year. If a potential winner is going to take the quantity route, they need to play in as many games as possible.
We don’t need to look far to find a good example of the importance of not missing games. Last year Daicos (28 votes) finished third behind Neale (31 votes) and Marcus Bontempelli (29 votes) after being forced to sit out of the final three games of the regular season due to injury.
Daicos had led the count since round 17 and entered the final round level with Neale, who went on to win his second Brownlow Medal after he was awarded three votes for his 30-disposal, 10 clearance effort against St Kilda.
Twenty-nine of the 46 Brownlow Medallists since 1984 played every game, and a further eight winners only missed one game.
Five players missed two games, three players have missed three games, and only one player – Nat Fyfe in 2015 – has won the Brownlow despite missing four games over the course of the season.
This means that Brownlow Medallists have, on average, missed less than one game in the year they topped the count.
How many games do you need to poll in to win the Brownlow?
Simply playing regularly throughout the season isn’t always enough, however.
There are plenty of players who pull on the boots week in, week out and fail to get recognised, like former Bulldog and Magpie Jordan Roughead, who played 193 regular season games over a 13-year period and never polled a vote.
As the number of games in a season has changed over time, we can try to make things fairer by looking at the percentage of games each winner polled in relative to the number of games they played.
For example, Lachie Neale only played 17 home and away games in the covid-affected 2020 season, while this year players could have played 23.
The proportion of games they Brownlow Medallist has polled in since 1984 has ranged from 31.8% (Robert DiPierdomenico, who polled in seven of his 18 games when he shared the medal with Greg Williams in 1986) through to 72.7% (Ollie Wines, who polled in 16 of his 22 games in 2021).
As we can see from the above example and the graph below, the average Brownlow Medallist over the past four decades has polled in just over half of the games they played in.
However, the proportion of games the winner polls in is slowing increasing over time.
How many three vote games do you need to win the Brownlow?
Finally, we move onto three vote games. The media loves trying to figure out how many best on grounds a player will earn of the course of the season, as these games can potentially go a long way to winning overall.
The proportion of games where the Brownlow Medallist has polled three votes has also increased over time from 18.1% when Peter Moore topped the count in 1984 to 30.4% when Neale won in 2023.
The record for the lowest proportion of three vote games by a Brownlow Medallist is 9.1%, when Adam Goodes was awarded three votes just twice in his 22 games in 2003 – the year he tied with Mark Ricciuto and Nathan Buckley.
Buckley didn’t fare much better than year and is only saved by the fact he played one fewer game than Goodes – but he still polled three votes in only two games that year.
On the other end of the scale, Lachie Neale polled three votes in 10 of his 17 games in the shortened 2020 season, or 58.8% of his games.
Neale’s feat is more impressive when you consider that he polled votes in 11 games, meaning all bar one of the games he polled he was viewed as being the best player on the ground.
What does it all mean for tonight’s count?
Both Cripps and Daicos played every game in 2024, so the trend of Brownlow Medallists playing in every (or almost every) game looks like it will continue for another year.
Many of the models where round-by-round data are available have both players polling in more than half of their games, with the Wheelo Ratings predictor suggesting Daicos will poll in 19 of his 23 games – just shy of 83%. This would well and truly pass Wines’ record if it happens.
Looking at data from the fast 40 years suggests that the winner is trending towards winning “Charlie” based on both quality and quantity – being the best on ground for longer over the course of the season.
Several of the models and predictions suggest this year will follow that trend, which means it’s only a matter of time before we see a player set a new record for the most votes in a single season (the current record is 36, held by Dustin Martin [2017] and Ollie Wines [2021]).
While the Carlton fan in me would love to see Cripps win again, I wouldn’t be surprised if Daicos beats him.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if Neale comes from nowhere and wins his third Brownlow, or if Bontempelli finally claims his first.
Thanks for reading! 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.