Do you mean tone like Strawbs O'Dwyer, Ty Elser, Simon Eastaugh, Matthew Clarke, Robert Schaefer, Wayne Thornborrow, Paddy Steinfort, Steven McKee, Ben Marsh and Trent Knobel 
. We sure have had our list of failed ruckmen of the years whether drafted or grabbed from other clubs.
Decent ones like Greg Dear, Justin Charles, Stafford and Simmo all came from other clubs. Benny Gale is probably our only successful homegrown ruckman and he was more decent than a star ruckman. Otto really only had one top year with us. In fact he's probably only had one good year at Geelong also but because that one was their premiership year it's seen as a great trade for them while Meyer is gone and Patto's future is still up in the air.
I think our lack of producing top ruckmen in recent times it's more due to a lack of drafting ruckmen in the first place than poor development. Bloody Spud didn't draft one ruckman in his whole 5 years 
. Between Ottens and Patto (who this year is not being used as a pure ruckman) that's a 7 year gap without drafting a ruckman. If you then jump to Putt/Vickery it becomes a 10-11 year gap 
. We've overrelied on Staff and Simmo to carry the load since Benny Gale retired.
At least now we have a large number of young rucks on our list. So in the short-term our lack of top class ruckmen is still an issue but we should be okay in say 5 years time as Vickery, Browne, Gus and hopefully Putt come through to replace Simmo.
i reckon the real question should be when was the last time we used a decent pick on a young ruckman or two and went the development path.
ottens was in 1997 we used pick 2. it took until 2008 to use another decent pick on a ruckman and that was vickery at pick 8. vickery showed pretty early he was going to struggle to become a genuine #1 ruckman.
i could be wrong but i believe from 1997 to 2008 the highest pick we used on a young ruckman was pick 51.
theres a kid called darcy cameron he should go somewhere around pick 25 perhaps we should do all we can to get a pick around 20 to target him.
the other option is use pick 11 on longer and imo hes worth it. failing this we will continue to go down the retread path which has in the main failed us and certainly not given us a long term solution.
we have just one bona fide #1 ruckman on our list and he just entered the veteran stage of his career. we also have orren stephenson who was taken for no other reason than we needed some insurance if ivan went down.
i really do question if this club has an inkling of what succession planning is about.
we should have but dont have a kid like billy longer in our system. a genuine bona fide #1 ruckman learning the ropes and prepareing to take over from ivan in two yrs maybe 3 yrs time.
what we do have in our system is a hedging of bets. we have 3 or 4 who can do a leigh brown role if we need. we cant say vickery mcbean or elton will ever become good #1 ruckmen.
