There are very few lengthy chats about footy at the water cooler and not much banter between staff who support opposing clubs and I am employed at a place you would call a Rugby League Nursery.
Going back a while i spent 8 or nine months in Brisbane and this was something I noticed and had trouble understanding. One job i worked there was some discussion about rugby. this was in the off season but one bloke was a coach of a local side and another, a kiwi, ( what a surprise in QLD) was a keen union man had a nephew or cousin who was getting close to all black selection.
The other job was during the league season, we often played touch footy at lunch time but there was very little footy talk at smoko. A big contrast to when i was working in melbourne.
The exception was state of oranges games, but i that had more to do with NSW/Qld rivalry.
And doesn't have a tenth of the support, esteem or rivalry driven by the history and loyalty of our code. The NRL playing group has little 'connection' with it's supporter base because their players are employees in the true sense of the word, moving freely (and often) from job to job, both local or overseas whenever they like, with very public negotiations normally taking place during the course of the season. The AFL, even though an elite and professional code, still maintains a strong link to it's roots through it's playing group and like it or not, the draft and salary cap go a long way to preserving that. And I wouldn't have it any other way - if free agency means the NRL way then you can place it firmly where the sun don't shine.
The AFL is better supported because honestly it is a better product on the field. This does not mean that the AFL administration are doing everything right. Compare the standard deviation of wins or compare the number of close games and it becomes clear that all that the draft does is encourage teams to sit on their backside and wait for their time to come than to fight and win games. The AFL will never have a story like Wests Tigers in '05 because of this.
The point about moving overseas is a moot one when comparing with AFL. And the freedom of player movement at least lets you separate those who really love the club and are loyal from those who are bound to false loyalty by the system. Rather than letting players honour their contract and then go to e.g. their boyhood club you have a whole heap of cat-and-mouse games between club, agent, player, other clubs. Real threats, veiled threats, false threats. The Luke Ball episode was bad for footy IMHO. Free agency can't come soon enough.
But talking of history and tradition, the NRL have two things right -
1) Still using at surburban grounds.
2) Kids coming up through the ranks U17s/U19s/U21s/reserves/seniors. IMHO this is a more interesting story than kids going into a draft pool.
A good debate Jake. 
I certainly agree that the AFL Administration are not doing everything right - I am a very vocal opponent of Demetriou's decision-making arrogance, especially with things like rule changes. I don't know that the draft itself encourages clubs to "sit on their backside" - I would think that the main driver for doing that is the system of priority picks (an area the AFL are getting VERY wrong). No club will remain viable in the long term of our code if they are seen by their supporters to be doing nothing to improve. And those proponents of the tank among us will say that it has proved itself a panacea for improvement in recent years.
As far as overseas goes I think it is a very relevant point when discussing the 'connection' we AFL supporters feel we have with our clubs. NRL Players disappear completely off the radar when they go overseas and put nothing back into the grass roots level of their sport by doing that. Compare that to the AFL discards/retirees who return to the bush to play out their final years or even coach - they make it attractive to go to bush footy and they provide a real (I can touch it, I can feel it) link for the everyday supporter. NRL players, by the very behaviour their code promotes, remain aloof in the public perception except for the handful that end up in high profile media positions. I don't believe the Luke Ball episode was bad for footy at all - behind closed doors most of the key players would have known a long time ago what was the reality of the situation - we (the media-fed public) were just taken along for the ride and you can't say it wasn't good for keeping up a level of interest in the off-season. What are the NRL doing at the moment on a daily basis? And I genuinely ask while living in an NRL stronghold - I really don't know!
Still at suburban grounds? Yep, emotionally I agree 100% but the reality is that if we (the nationalised competition) wanted to keep our attendance and support growth levels happening then we had to rationalise. Did we go too far? My opinion is yes - we could have kept improving another couple of grounds to a level commensurate with Skilled Stadium and kept a more 'suburban' identity but is our game at that level any more? I think our clubs now identify with their supporter base rather than the suburb they originally represented - but our club is very lucky to have retained a strong link with Richmond the suburb and Punt Rd the ground. We (Richmond) should move heaven and earth to continue nurturing this in the future - it will pay off in spades.
Kids coming through the ranks is a double-edged sword. If a system drives the NRL approach then they also drive the approach of raping and pillaging the lower junior levels of any half reasonable talent into a couple of feeder clubs in order to tie up every potential senior player they can before said players appear on the radar of other clubs. This has a potentially devastating effect on the growth of your code at the grass roots level. Municipal boundaries play no part in segregating these kids fairly - money speaks all languages and the parents of these kids are as susceptible to funded arrangements as anyone else. From an ego perspective, you might even mount a case for being more susceptible. I listened to a former Wallaby test player (now doing a breakfast radio gig in Brisbane) laugh at the AFL televising the draft nationwide a few weeks ago. I say to him - what was your code doing? Which code was connecting with it's supporters in the middle of the off-season? I know who the laugh was on!
I am a big fan of the draft and the salary cap Jake. For all the shortcomings in our current system, I believe it is light years ahead of the alternatives as far as strengthening the position of our code in the very competitive environment in this country for support and the corporate dollar.
I think one of the reason NRL clubs have been able to keep their suburban grounds is they just dont need to accommodate the size crowds that the AFL clubs do. To have upgraded most of the grounds to a suitable standard would not have been cost effective, and like it or not, the dollar is the bottom line.
It's interesting that after the zone system was replaced by the draft system a large number of country clubs (and perhaps suburban clubs?) started to dissapear. I grew up in a Fitzroy zone, and even though they they were not a rich club, we always saw a presence. Once or twice a year someone from the club would come and take a training session (juniors) and they would leave behind a bunch of new footys. They provided jumpers for the hampden school boys side and may have provided our jumpers too? I'm sure they propped up local footy in many other ways as they had a vested interest
Perhaps this system did favour the richer clubs, i dont know as i never experienced another zones development to compare it with but it was after the change that clubs started to disappear, whether this was causal, coincidence or perhaps the VFL saw it coming, again i dont know.
Kids pretty much knew and accepted who they would be playing for if they were good enough to make the VFL/AFL . Kids were not rushed in their development and didnt feel they had missed out if they were not on a clubs list by the time they were 18. If a kid was a standout at junior level because of his size he would be tried against the men. If he was good enough he would progress, if he struggled against those he couldn't just knock about... well every one knew where they stood rather the build up of expectations and disappointments we see with the current system. One thing I did not see as a junior, was the large number of 17-18 year olds needing corrective surgery that we are currently witnessing
