Recruitment

[ace]

Every season each AFL club must recruit an average of just over 500 player games (508.75)
A reasonable recruitment plan would require
1st round draft pick 200 games
2nd round draft pick 150 games
3rd round draft pick 100 games i.e. 200 games every two 3rd round picks
4th round draft pick 50 games i.e. 200 games every four 4th round picks
Every game played by a 1st round pick needs to high quality, as 1st round picks would constitute 40% of the team, 2nd round picks 30%, 3rd round picks 20%, 4th round picks 10%.
Failure to meet this plan means players must emerge from the rookie list or else a team must benefit from priority picks, a requirement for which the team must be a failure.

How has St Kilda used its’ 1st round picks recently
2007 pick 9 Ben McEvoy
2006 pick 9 David Armitage
2005 pick 17 traded for Fergus Watts
2004 pick 17 Andrew McQualter
2003 pick 8 Raphael Clarke
2002 pick 6 traded for Barry Brooks
McEvoy and Armitage have yet to develop sufficiently to be properly assessed.
The club has already passed judgement on the value of Watts, McQualter and Brooks
We can only hope for Raph, but so far he has not looked like a star.
It seems that for four consecutive years the saints failed with their 1st round pick.
That means for the next 10 years the club will be trying to win matches with 4 star players short.
The present list may look good, good enough to play finals, but to be brutally honest to win a premiership it needed those 4 picks to be stars, not flops. And then after the present crop of stars are gone, the club has to expect to fall to the bottom.
The price of 4 years of recruitment failure is probably 10 years in the wilderness and no premiership.

[bigcarl]

nice first post ace.

personally i wouldn't write off raph just yet. these guys take time to come on. you have to perservere. imo raph has what it takes to be a star, but whether the work ethic's there is another thing.

i like what i've seen of mcevoy so far

[Batnoe]

nice first post ace.

personally i wouldn't write off raph just yet. these guys take time to come on. you have to perservere. imo raph has what it takes to be a star, but whether the work ethic's there is another thing.

i like what i've seen of mcevoy so far

And what about the players that you pick up in second round that deserve or could have been first round? Based on other teams needs they may pick a player up that didnt deserve to be first round

I agree, our first rounders havent been that good but the rest of the trade/draft have been

Before the last few years, we have had lots of great first rounders
Kosi, Riewoldt, Ball, Dal Santo, X Clarke, Goddard


These are the players that you can build a team around

Then players like Joey, Goose and Sam Fisher that only got picked up 2nd 3rd 4th rounder that are playing well enough to be a first rounder

[Armoooo]

Our recruiting was brilliant from about 2001-2004, however it has dropped since then, but what can you expect we started getting pick 17s instead of picks 1 and 2....

[ace]

2000 Riewoldt was a priority pick at No 1 a reward for winning the wooden spoon.
Kosi was our 1 st round pick at No 2.
They are both star players but we didn't even need a recruitment department to select them. We only needed to read the newspapers. A bit like Carlton this year had a choice of Kreuzer or Kreuzer at No 1.

2001 The super draft, We had priority pick No. 2 we took the player who until last year was considered the 3rd best Luke Ball. Hawthorn took 2nd best with Hodge. Both Hawthorn and St Kilda let Judd slip to pick No 3.

Our 1st round pick was pick 5, X, he can be a great player when fully fit but when is he ever fully fit, same problem with Ball. Jimmy Bartel was taken at pick No 8, Sam Mitchell at pick 36. They are often fit. We let two brownlow medallist Judd and Bartel slip through our fingers. Ouch!

We did well getting Dal at pick No 13. That would be worth celebrating except that it should have been pick No 1. (Hodge or Judd) Sydney took Barry Hall for pick Nos 13, 17 and 45. A massive rip off. We used pick No 17 in a trade for Heath Black who took our money and then went home. Yes our recruitment department did well to get Aaron Fiora when it looked like we would get nothing for Black.

Oh just imagine a forward line G and Kosi in the square, Hall and Riewoldt at centre half forward. You have got the ball, running through the centre of the ground Riewoldt leads right, Hall leads left, each take two defenders with, leaving a massive hole at CHF, G leads straight up the centre, two defenders in toe. Who do you kick to. Take a bounce and kick long to Kosi all alone in the square. The Grand Final would be over at quarter time.

We did make up somewhat with Maguire at pick No 21 (2nd round) and Montagna at No 37 (3rd round) were gems. But then you still have to get 60% of your player games out of 2nd, 3rd and 4th round picks.

2002 Carlton were to have picks No 1 (priority) and No 2 (1st round). They were going to take Goddard and Wells. They got caught doing what Carlton does best and lost both picks. We moved from pick No 3 to pick No 1. We took Goddard - no recruitment department needed there.

We lost Peter Everitt to Hawthorn in exchange for picks No 6 and No 22
and got Barry Brooks with a trade No 6 and Matthew Ferguson pick No 22. St Kilda had been planning to take Salopek with pick No 3 he was taken by Port Adelaide with our pick No 6. Ouch! Everitt given away for free!

It is good to see we now have a new recruitment supremo but had the good sense not to tip the baby out with the bath water. Beveridge did the best he could with an under funded department, he will remain a valuable asset. Winning a premiership is about recruiting better and holding the team together within the salary cap better, than your opponents.

[ausfatcat]

you have to remember ACE that trading and recruiting are done by different people, as well as the fact the saints spent approximately one fifth of what collingwood/west coast spend so you can't expect the same results.

But despite all of the money recruiting is a game of chance and the higher pick and money put into recruiting the lower the odds are to pickup a long term player but it is still a gamble regardless. Look at all the 300+ (there may not even be 200 gamer No 1 pick) gamers of No. 1 picks.

[Solar]

also depends on the strength of the draft, where abouts you are on your development of the team, what you need, development and a little luck.

See the stories of the fishers, leigh was never going to play in the TAC cup except for a late minute injury, this allowed him to have a very good game and thus get picked up. Will go on to play 150+ game IMO.
Sam fisher was playing golf until the age of 22? Only took up football a year later and was a smokie as a third round pick? If maguire goes down at any stage chips will play CHB, and given some luck should go on to play 150+ games (slightly less because he started so late).

Luke ball was seen by a lot of recruiters as the best of the bunch, in fact from memory it was between ball, polak and hodge. Hawks went for hodge because they traded croad for a ready made midfielder and punted on the more mature body in hodge. We went for the youngster in ball who was very highly rated. Had no injury concerns (see judd's shoulders pre draft). This is where the luck comes in, ball has struggled through OP for the last 3 years, before that in '04 he had a year very similar to joel selwood this year. Young, tough, getting lots of ball. I think we all forget how good ball was in 2004 for a 20 year old!!

On the Hall trade, we need to remember that this was before hall went on to win the swans a flag. He was a reasonable full forward, but eratic with a bad off field record. It was a very good trade in the sense that we got some 2nd and 3rd round picks in the super draft.

On the brooks trade, there are a couple of things to note. Brooks was the highest rated ruckman form the judd/hodge/ball draft and thus it was highly sensible to trade for him. Pick six in the goddard draft (a weaker one then the previous one) for a highly rated 19 year old ruckman was not a bad trade AT THE TIME. We had pick 3 at the time and thus had no idea that pick 6 was going to be anything but that.

I would suggest that you would look at 3 senior players out of each draft.

Off my head we have

2007
(too soon to call)
2006
Armo - if he can get his fitness up should slot into the midfield
Howard - iffy. Will be a big year for him next year
Allen - highly rated tall who will push for a spot in 2008/09
CJ - played senior football and might become a senior player
eddy- rookie who impressed for casey
attard - before injury he was a senior player off rookie list
geary - should become a good midfielder for us
The van - developing ruck

So I would think that we will have between 2 (in 2007/08) up to 6 senior players from this lot in the next 2 years.

2005
Gilbert - senior player, not a bad pick up for pick 33, makes up for giving away pick 17
Watts - traded for our pick 17
Rix - pick 49, senior player
raymond - miss
sweeney - miss

So so year, watts was unfortunate with injury but happy with gilbo and rix. not much of value after rix, with perhaps stookes the only senior players after 49 (let alone 50+ players)

2004
mini - star junior, miss
Ackland - miss
mcgough - miss
gwilt - might make it, might play 100+ games

bad year

2003
raph clrake - will play 100+ games, still might be a star
Sam fisher - great pick up
callahagn - redrafted a club stalwart

So this was after an awesome 2002 draft where we picked up ball, dal santo, goose, joey

So from my reasoning we had shocker draft in 2004, reasonable draft in 2003 and 2005 (got 2/3 senior players out of each draft) and the last 2 drafts are still to show their fruit.

It's very hit and miss

[saintspremiers]

Agree 100% with you ace, also need to factor in the rookie list that we all know was neglected until last year.

I see the rookie list as your insurance policy if (or should I say when) some of your national draft selections don't work out.

When doing an analysis of your kind, it's good to look at what all clubs did with their first rounders, and there correlate that to their rookie selections to get the overall picture.

IMO having 7 rookies on our list should hopefully mean we get one rookie per year minimum being good enough to make the senior list - significantly reducing pressure on the National Draft and giving you more chance of those 500 games per year you've mentioned.

[Eastern]

We need to look at history when thinking of this as the draft is littered with examples of how inexact it really is

Nick DalSanto was taken at Pick 13. Pick 14 in the same year Nth Melb took Ashley Watson, who was a team-mate of Dal at Bendigo Pioneers. Watson only played a handful of games and was de-listed !!

[Shaggy]

Very interesting thread.

Completely opposite slant to those who think our rookies should be making the difference which I think is a nonsense.

But in terms of numbers I think you will find the Saints more than make the numbers you have set for the early draft choices.

I count 15 former first rounders on our list. Depending upon injury they should control our destiny.

The problem in the past is that too many of our first rounders have been injured (IMO).

[supersaints]

Every season each AFL club must recruit an average of just over 500 player games (508.75)
A reasonable recruitment plan would require
1st round draft pick 200 games
2nd round draft pick 150 games
3rd round draft pick 100 games i.e. 200 games every two 3rd round picks
4th round draft pick 50 games i.e. 200 games every four 4th round picks
Every game played by a 1st round pick needs to high quality, as 1st round picks would constitute 40% of the team, 2nd round picks 30%, 3rd round picks 20%, 4th round picks 10%.
Failure to meet this plan means players must emerge from the rookie list or else a team must benefit from priority picks, a requirement for which the team must be a failure.


How has St Kilda used its’ 1st round picks recently
2007 pick 9 Ben McEvoy
2006 pick 9 David Armitage
2005 pick 17 traded for Fergus Watts
2004 pick 17 Andrew McQualter
2003 pick 8 Raphael Clarke
2002 pick 6 traded for Barry Brooks
McEvoy and Armitage have yet to develop sufficiently to be properly assessed.
The club has already passed judgement on the value of Watts, McQualter and Brooks
We can only hope for Raph, but so far he has not looked like a star.
It seems that for four consecutive years the saints failed with their 1st round pick.
That means for the next 10 years the club will be trying to win matches with 4 star players short.
The present list may look good, good enough to play finals, but to be brutally honest to win a premiership it needed those 4 picks to be stars, not flops. And then after the present crop of stars are gone, the club has to expect to fall to the bottom.
The price of 4 years of recruitment failure is probably 10 years in the wilderness and no premiership.

IMO A bit simplified a first round pick can be as low as 17 (if you finish on top), I would not expect half the players in the first round to play 200 games. It may be expected from the first five or six players or maybe top ten in a good draft year.....

[BAM! (shhhh)]

Every season each AFL club must recruit an average of just over 500 player games (508.75)
A reasonable recruitment plan would require
1st round draft pick 200 games
2nd round draft pick 150 games
3rd round draft pick 100 games i.e. 200 games every two 3rd round picks
4th round draft pick 50 games i.e. 200 games every four 4th round picks

How did you arrive at the 500 games number? That seems incredible to me, especially when as part of picking 3 100 gamers on an annual basis.

Without having crunched any numbers (because I get the impression you have, and would like a bit more context), a 200 gamer is a 10 year player. If by the end if his carreer your model is successfully followed, for a 40% team of 1st rounders, that allows no missed pick in 10 years, and they need to go incredibly well.

With mandated list turnover of 3 players per annum, including a retiree, it would think it will be a rare year where you lose 500 games in one hit, and would suspect a single year where 500 games were recruited (including rookie picks etc.) would go down as stellar. e.g. Saints in '01 recruited Ball, Dal Santo, Maguire, Xavier Clarke, Montagna and have since aquired Gram and Brooks... I would expect the '01 draft might get to 500. '00 when we got Kosi and Roo is basically on the backs of those 2, and there's still a lot of water under the bridge to 500. that's 9 players on the list today, around 20-25% of the list taken up (and 9 starting 22, so making it tough for others to build up games).

Which leads me to the conclusion that while a brilliant subject for the OP, I suspect your numbers are off. Love to have you prove me wrong though.

[RBnW]

Here are some facts since 1996 for all clubs, this was in the Sunday Mail in SA in October this year.
Shows an interesting table of Games played by all picks of 30 and below by all clubs......since 1996


AVERAGE ACROSS ALL 16 AFL CLUBS

AVERAGE GAMES
NUMBER OF PICKS 30 AND UNDER
St Kilda 83.4 18
Fremantle 69.9 16
West Coast 58.2 25
Sydney 54.8 18
Port Adelaide 50.1 19
Bulldogs 49.8 20
Brisbane 49.4 20
Melbourne 48.1 22
Essendon 47.6 28
Kangaroos 45.7 22
Geelong 45.0 22
Richmond 40.2 17
Collingwood 37.0 22
Hawthorn 34.7 25
Adelaide 32.7 13
Carlton 29.1 15

Puts Johnnie Bev and his team in a good light even with the failures...
good work John....especially when you add Gilbo to this.......
not bad for no money being spent and a few blues......
Puts the loss of our 4 picks into some sort of a reality

[saintspremiers]

Here are some facts since 1996 for all clubs, this was in the Sunday Mail in SA in October this year.
Shows an interesting table of Games played by all picks of 30 and below by all clubs......since 1996


AVERAGE ACROSS ALL 16 AFL CLUBS

AVERAGE GAMES
NUMBER OF PICKS 30 AND UNDER
St Kilda 83.4 18
Fremantle 69.9 16
West Coast 58.2 25
Sydney 54.8 18
Port Adelaide 50.1 19
Bulldogs 49.8 20
Brisbane 49.4 20
Melbourne 48.1 22
Essendon 47.6 28
Kangaroos 45.7 22
Geelong 45.0 22
Richmond 40.2 17
Collingwood 37.0 22
Hawthorn 34.7 25
Adelaide 32.7 13
Carlton 29.1 15

Puts Johnnie Bev and his team in a good light even with the failures...
good work John....especially when you add Gilbo to this.......
not bad for no money being spent and a few blues......
Puts the loss of our 4 picks into some sort of a reality

please post this important piece of info on TalkingCarlton!

[ausfatcat]

nice RBnW



Hopefully a few others will see this thread and those figures and realise that other teams pick duds too, in fact pick duds in the top 30 more than what St kilda does!!!!

[RBnW]

nice RBnW



Hopefully a few others will see this thread and those figures and realise that other teams pick duds too, in fact pick duds in the top 30 more than what St kilda does!!!!

thanks ausfatcat ...It is good info and shows what John Bev is all about and has been about for a long time, maybe with the off field support this year we can go all the way....there is a lot to like about whats going on....

should i post this as a new thread???

[Oh When the Saints]

Nah, leave it in this thread mate.

I posted it on the Carlton board BTW

[RBnW]

Nah, leave it in this thread mate.

I posted it on the Carlton board BTW

thanks ....they will love that...what is the site I will have a look

[Oh When the Saints]

http://www.talkingcarlton.com/phpBB2/vi ... 52&start=0

Bottom of page one of that thread.

[ace]

Every year you play 22 home & away games with 22 players per team. That makes 22 x 22 = 484 player games per club
7 finals are played with a total of 44 players on the field in each game.
That is s 7 x 44 = 308 player games shared between 16 clubs.
That is an average of 308 / 16 = 19.25 player games on average per club.
484 + 19.25 = 503.25 player games per club.
It does not matter whether you have picks 1, 17, 33, 49 or picks 16, 32,48, 64 you still need to get over 500 player games out of the players you recruit each year on average.
The quality of the games may be better if you have 1, 17 etc. But if you have 16, 32 etc they still have to play because you have to field full teams of 22 players for all 22 home & away games.
That is why it is so important that 1st round picks are decent players if not stars. If a 1st round pick gets cut from the list, someone else has to not only play his own quota of games, they have to make up for the failure of the 1st round pick.

[BAM! (shhhh)]

Every year you play 22 home & away games with 22 players per team. That makes 22 x 22 = 484 player games per club
7 finals are played with a total of 44 players on the field in each game.
That is s 7 x 44 = 308 player games shared between 16 clubs.
That is an average of 308 / 16 = 19.25 player games on average per club.
484 + 19.25 = 503.25 player games per club.
It does not matter whether you have picks 1, 17, 33, 49 or picks 16, 32,48, 64 you still need to get over 500 player games out of the players you recruit each year on average.
The quality of the games may be better if you have 1, 17 etc. But if you have 16, 32 etc they still have to play because you have to field full teams of 22 players for all 22 home & away games.
That is why it is so important that 1st round picks are decent players if not stars. If a 1st round pick gets cut from the list, someone else has to not only play his own quota of games, they have to make up for the failure of the 1st round pick.

Okay, that throws things into a slightly different light for me, I understand where you're coming from.

BUT, in order to come up with a recruiting model, we'd first need a list model, and a list is not just the starting 22:

While the average of 503.25 games per year would be the figure if we widened the band of "recruitment" to include returning players, as it becomes a minimum, if we take even a rebuilding club, it becomes an unrealistic target because it's the bottom of the list that gets turned over.

By the Numbers

List size: AFL lists are 38 players long, and 22 players will play an AFL match on a weekly basis for 22 rounds. additionally, there are 6 rookies (7 in our case) expanding the possible selection list to 44. games needed as a result: 0

Injuries: According to the 2006 Injury Report published by the AFL (don't think 2k7 is out yet) http://afl.com.au/Portals/0/afl_docs/06injsurv2_5.pdf claims an average of 139.5 games were missed due to injury in 2006. If we assume the same rate for 2k7, then we can say that of the 503.95 then only 28% of the games will include players outside the starting 22 for this reason. games needed as a result: 139.5

List Skill Of course, the starting 22 is not written in stone. At any club, there are probably 6-10 players who would be considered "fringe" who could be dropped at any time for a player from the latter half of the list. We can assume rookies don't factor here as they only enter the list due to injury. This would accoutn for 15-25% of listed players. games needed as a result: 75-126

The chopping block when turning over a list, there are 2 ways to go, retiring, or being delisted - the difference needs be noted, because only the retirees would come from the starting 22. This year 39 retired, from a mandated 66 delistees (it's always higher than the minimum, but google's not hepling much), i'm going to go on a limb and assume 4 delistings per club for a total of 88, which means 44% of turnover actually creates an opening in the first 22... an actual turnover of just under 2 per club in the top 22. games needed as a result: 44

Games Needed As a Result The point of all this is the actual number of games per year that need to be recruited. What I've noted above is the amount of opportunities provided to those outside the starting 22 as a result of each noted item. The total figure is between 259-309 games per year for players outside the starting 22.

further data needed (also read, don't have time to do this in detail right now, I will try and come back to it) we need to turn over the bottom half of the list too - and that's 2 per year from the remaining 16 players going out, and we'd have 2 graduating on to the senior list. We need to be able to account for rookies, trades, and PSD as methods of recruitment as well.

At the moment IMO it's closer to 300 games we need to recruit per year. I still think that's high (I believe accounting for 4-5 year 2nd tier players will bring the number down further... certainly intuitively my 2 graduates per year are unlikely to both be 150 gamers), but closer. I'd like to be able to extend this to give a reasonable model for a list and hence recruiting that fits what ace is trying to achieve.

Love it - wish today was a Saturday in january so I had the time![/i]