Full predicted ‘23 AFL ladderMax Laughton
Fox Sports
March 13th, 2023 Let’s work out the tricky stuff first: Who’s going to miss out.
It’s predicted AFL ladder season, which guarantees a bunch of educated guesses which will all be wrong to some degree.
But there’s no point being boring with predictions — and there’s no point playing it safe. Especially because there is always more change than you think.
Rule 1: On average there will be three changes to the top eight (teams dropping in/climbing out), and at a minimum two.
And when we say the minimum is two changes, we mean it. Since the top eight was introduced in 1994 there have been at least two changes every year. (The average, to be precise, is 2.8 changes.)
Rule 2: On average one team that missed the finals the year before will climb into the top four.
While Rule 2 has not been right every single year like Rule 1 has, it has happened for eight seasons in a row. (The average is 1.2 teams that make the leap from non-finalist to top four.)
These rules give us some structure. They tell us that, even though it’s very hard to look at the ladder and pick which teams will drop out (especially this year), you need to find at least two if you’re any hope of being correct.
Unsurprisingly, it’s more likely that teams in the fifth to eighth range will drop out than teams from the first to fourth range. To be precise, of the 79 teams that have made the eight then dropped out the next year, 58 had finished 5th-8th, while just 21 had finished 1st-4th.
The numbers are very similar when you look at finals results: 24 teams made a prelim or and then missed the next year’s finals, compared to 55 teams that had lost in the first two weeks of September.
So back to Rule 1, and our most likely candidates to drop out of the top eight are Fremantle, Brisbane, Richmond and the Western Bulldogs, plus Melbourne given it lost in the semi-finals.
We’re going to rule the Demons out right away because they just seem way too good not to fix whatever ailed them in their post-bye slide.
The Lions and Tigers are in a similar group: Strong performers over the last four years who bolstered their midfields across the off-season (Brisbane with Josh Dunkley and Will Ashcroft; Richmond with Tim Taranto and Jacob Hopper), which should in turn help protect their defences, which leaked some big scores at times last year.
In contrast the Dockers and Bulldogs kind of shuffled some pieces around in the trade period.
So based on all of that, we’d be tipping the Bulldogs and Fremantle to drop out of the eight. Simple?
Well … then there’s Collingwood.
Last year’s Collingwood was a 16-win team with the percentage of a 12-win team. We’d put them somewhere in-between that in reality – just as good as the Fremantle/Brisbane/Richmond/Bulldogs quartet across the course of the season, and they peaked in September (which is a damn good time to peak).
They could easily be a better team this year yet win fewer games. And they could be this year’s Port Adelaide, who went from 17-5 in 2021 (with the AFL’s best record in close games) to 10-12 in 2022 (with the AFL’s worst record in close games).
So are we tipping the Magpies to actually drop out of the eight? Let’s see …
MAX LAUGHTON’S PREDICTED 2023 LADDER1. Geelong Cats
2. Melbourne
3. Brisbane Lions
4. Carlton
5. RichmondIf you read our Power Rankings over the course of last season you know we were leading the Richmond Respecters brigade.
Despite sitting outside the eight as late as Round 20, and even after their weird winless run which saw them draw with Fremantle and lose to the Suns and Kangaroos, we believed in the Tigers. After all, after the Anzac Eve game, they didn’t lose again by more than a kick.
The problem was they lost enough games by a kick to tumble out of the finals without winning one. If they’d gotten over the line against Brisbane, they definitely could’ve beaten Melbourne (especially the version we saw in that semi-final) and made a prelim … but they didn’t.
So it’s that belief in this Tigers group, combined with the obviously fantastic additions of Tim Taranto and Jacob Hopper into the midfield, that have us (like most of the AFL commentariat) expecting a rise in 2023.
But we’re not quite sure how high.
The Tigers feel very much like Brisbane: A scoring machine with a bolstered midfield that needs to figure out a way to stop the opposition from scoring, too.
For Damien Hardwick’s men in 2022, it was a drop in pressure combined with being bottom six in the AFL for scores per inside 50 against. Once you got it forward against Richmond, you could hit the scoreboard. Dylan Grimes was still very good (when healthy) one-on-one, but Robbie Tarrant was slightly underwhelming.
So we have question marks over their defensive stocks. But again, like with the Lions, that’s a problem they need to address in time for the finals, not across the entire season.
The Tigers are going to score a lot of points and win a lot of games in the home and away campaign, because that’s what they did last year (the first six weeks excluded) – they won eight games by five goals or more. As we often say, the sign of a good team is winning, but the sign of a great team is winning by a lot.
Can they stop a Geelong, Melbourne or Brisbane in September? That we’re not so sure about. But they should get the chance to show us.
6. Sydney Swans
7. Port Adelaide
8. Fremantle
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9. Collingwood
10. Western Bulldogs
11. Gold Coast Suns
12. Adelaide Crows
13. St Kilda
14. West Coast Eagles
15. GWS Giants
16. Essendon
17. North Melbourne
18. Hawthorn
https://www.foxsports.com.au/afl/blues-make-the-leap-power-surge-and-the-magpies-miss-full-predicted-23-afl-ladder/news-story/91ee037e7322fd79ebca8715bc494980
