The Rookie Draft Thread

[chammond]

And while I repeat how disappointed I am that we've taken no NSW rookies, the success rate with these players hasn't been great. I still think the club has some kind of obligation to NSW players (notwithstanding their commitment to the scholarship programme) but the reality is that only Bevan can be considered to be an unqualified "get" as a local rookie, while Barlow is still making his way and I think Meiklejohn (long gone) is the only other one to ever play a senior game.

The club may feel some community obligation to NSW players, but in reality football development in NSW is the duty of the AFL. The Swans' "duty" is to do the best for the Swans, and when times get economically tough, the first costs to be cut will be the non-core expenditure, especially non-productive programs like the NSW rookies. If something had to go, I'd much prefer it to be that than cutting back on the player support stuff.

[Legs Akimbo]

Being rather uninformed, I think the fact we are limited to playing only 15 players in the Canberra league (or whatever it is), really makes taking the extra rookies a problem. The poor bastards would be training but only sporadically playing. A larger list would rob game time across the board.

or am i talking crap?

[Mr Magoo]

I think the decision was probably made mainly on an economic basis :

1. Things are tight for all businesses. I think it is underplaying the situation to say that three rookies are comparable to say Leo barrys salary. Each rookie would have a significant cost attached to their development (with probably only at best 1 in 3 actually making and probably about 1 in 12 say a rookie every 2 years) actually getting to even Leos current playing level. If fans want to help this then make sure you take up your membership . From articles in the paper it seems our membership dropped by some 6000 people last year. Say they were paying an average of $200 per person thats $1.2 million dollars. Now thats probably about three rookies.

2. There will always be more rookies next year. GC12 is not about to steal the entire market and will need to trade some of their draftee choices to build up a half competitive team for year one.

3. The swans are better off taking scholarship players which they can use when necessary for canberra but when their list is more fully available, they can feed back to their normal clubs. This situation doesnt seem to exist with rookies. It seems from the reports on R&W that a fair few "normal" reserve graders missed a spot in the GF team.

4. We should be concentrating on the ability of the main list. I would speculate that few 100 game players come off the rookie list. The rookie list is an experimental list and it seems has been treated so by the swans football department.

[goswannie14]

We should be concentrating on the ability of the main list. I would speculate that few 100 game players come off the rookie list. The rookie list is an experimental list and it seems has been treated so by the swans football department.

I disagree, have a look at this thread.
Best Bargains in the history of the Rookie draft.

[chammond]

I disagree, have a look at this thread.
Best Bargains in the history of the Rookie draft.

Hardly conclusive evidence. If rookie lists have been around for 11 years, then doesn't that mean there have been around 700 rookies going through the system? The article identifies only 17 genuine quality footballers . . . a success rate of about 2.5% (1 in 40?) . . . seems like a very expensive way to recruit!

[SimonH]

Hardly conclusive evidence. If rookie lists have been around for 11 years, then doesn't that mean there have been around 700 rookies going through the system? The article identifies only 17 genuine quality footballers . . . a success rate of about 2.5% (1 in 40?) . . . seems like a very expensive way to recruit!

No, because the rookie list was far, far less utilised before about 2003 than it is now. Both because clubs didn't appreciate how important it could be, and because of financial constraints for Vic clubs.

I would guess the numbers going through to this point at closer to 500, and we have maybe a dozen standouts who would walk into any side in the league; the article doesn't aim to be comprehensive, but there would be around a dozen more who are no stars but are serviceable players who earn their stripes (e.g. Peverill, our own Bevan). Even that doesn't determine the success rate, because there would be more than 50 who are still in the system but are yet to comprehensively prove themselves one way or t'other (e.g. at the Swans alone, Smith, MOD, Orreal and Murphy).

So if we guess that the hit rate is 5%, and if we were to let 3 available spots go begging each year, that's an extra long-term quality player roughly every 6 years we'd lose. Sounds trivial but bearing in mind that you can expect at least 10 years out of a long-term quality player, that's around 2 players we should expect to be up on all the non-Brissie sides. In a tight comp, that's potentially highly significant, and an advantage not to be thrown away lightly.

Rookies are paid absolute peanuts, too. (The award is on the AFLPA website.) And their salaries don't count as precious cap dollars. So it's quite an inexpensive way of recruiting.

[goswannie14]

Hardly conclusive evidence. If rookie lists have been around for 11 years, then doesn't that mean there have been around 700 rookies going through the system? The article identifies only 17 genuine quality footballers . . . a success rate of about 2.5% (1 in 40?) . . . seems like a very expensive way to recruit!

It's fine to bandy figures around, but it isn't a comprehensive list, it is simply a list of the top 10 rookie list bargains. You look at those names and I reckon you would be hard pressed to find a club that wouldn't be happy to have all of them in their sides.

[liz]

I think the answer lies somewhere between Chammond and Simon's views.

Kirk
Kennelly
Grundy
Bevan
Jack
Barlow
Smith
O'Dwyer
Jolly
Mattner

That is around a quarter of our 2009 senior list who have come via the rookie system. (Admittedly Kennelly's route was slightly separate - can argue either way whether he should be included or not in an assessment of the value of rookie lists.) Hlalf of those players can be expected to be pretty much permanent fixtures of our best 22 next season and three of those are arguably in our most important half dozen players. Plus Jack could well play the majority of the season and Barlow could prove to be important too if it all comes together for him.

So the impact on our current team is pretty clear.

[Dalai Lama]

all the rivers run

Nice to see Sigrid back on the list!

[Mr Magoo]

I dont think you could count Jolly , Mattner and Kennelly as successes of the rookie system in the way we are discussing.

Further Smith and ODwyer are not what I would consider to be permanent best 22 fixtures next season. (But I would them to step up and prove me wrong ).

My initial point was not that the rookie draft is a failure but moreso that it is still an experimental part of the list that sometimes leads to the player making the list for a year or two but rarely leads to a player of the quality of Leo Barry.

[chammond]

Rookies are paid absolute peanuts, too. (The award is on the AFLPA website.) And their salaries don't count as precious cap dollars. So it's quite an inexpensive way of recruiting.

No doubt rookies are paid peanuts, but it's still an expensive exercise.

Even if the success rate is as high as 1 in 20 (which I doubt), it means for most clubs that they get one good player every 5 years in exchange for 19 players who are complete waste of wages and development costs. Very poor compared to the return from players recruited through the national draft (or from overseas).

Anyhow, I must have got the wrong end of the debate here, because I had in mind the issue of the incremental cost of regional rookies to the Swans (and Brisbane I guess). Even if the success rate of NSW rookies is no worse than for rookies in general, it's hardly worth the extra risk and drain on resources if you've already got 5 or 6 general/international rookies to train up, unless you include the goodwill and PR factor.

In the current economic climate, I think that extra feelgood factor has disappeared.

[Nico]

As they say Hammo, business is business. We had a bad year financially then some feelgood costs need to be trimmed.

[DST]

It ain't just there salary that is the issue.

I was recently listening to SEN before the draft who were talking to a bloke from Champion Data who had done some research on 07 year figures into how much it costs (not including salary) to put a player on the park at each club when you take into account coaching, medical, fitness, travel, clothing, food etc.

It comes in at a staggering $120,000 worth of development costs per year on average per player. That's whether you are a senior, rookie or scholarship holder and does not include salary.

When you look at the pure numbers you can see why an extra three rookies can add up.

DST

[SimonH]

No doubt rookies are paid peanuts, but it's still an expensive exercise.

Even if the success rate is as high as 1 in 20 (which I doubt), it means for most clubs that they get one good player every 5 years in exchange for 19 players who are complete waste of wages and development costs. Very poor compared to the return from players recruited through the national draft (or from overseas).

Anyhow, I must have got the wrong end of the debate here, because I had in mind the issue of the incremental cost of regional rookies to the Swans (and Brisbane I guess). Even if the success rate of NSW rookies is no worse than for rookies in general, it's hardly worth the extra risk and drain on resources if you've already got 5 or 6 general/international rookies to train up, unless you include the goodwill and PR factor.

But the only 'risk' is the drain on resources, and compared with the footballing budget of the club generally, it's pitiful.

You'd be hard put looking at the actual data and constructing an argument that the success rate of rookies is less than 5%. The point being that if we take our full complement of 9 (if we pushed the boundaries w/ Pyke, it could even be 10), we can expect one long-term player to come through from the rookie list every 2-3 years, not every 5.

I think the basic data is pretty much agreed upon; it's just a question of what conclusions you draw from it.

Success rates in the draft are a continuum; the figures don't drop off a cliff at one particular point. The differential success rate between the last pick in the ND and pick #1 in the RD, would be close to zero. Success rate for players after about pick 55 of the ND would be no better than 10%; doesn't stop teams using the picks, as they know they need to dig through the dross to find the odd Nick Malceski and Jimmy Hird. Even for a pick in the 20s, the odds would be roughly 50% that you're going to piss time, a valuable list spot and development $ up against the wall.

The whole thing about 'we're wasting money paying these young players, giving them time, expertise and coaching resources, when huge numbers of them just fall by the wayside' is a criticism of the whole draft system (a criticism that has some validity), not of the rookie list in particular.

And your ND failures cost more, both because the award requires that they're paid more, and because you have to keep them for 2 years and then the poker player's dilemma often demands that you keep 'em for longer still. The amount that Aaron Bruce cost the Swans pales into insignificance compared with what Heath James, Josh Thewlis, little Willo or Andrew Ericksen cost us.

The more intangible/long term aspect of local rookies is that they remain in NSW/ACT while they learn their trade with the Swans, and hopefully improve the standard of the local comp if they leave the AFL system. A rising tide floats all boats.

As I think liz has alluded to, even if you agree with the decision, the unprofessional way it's been handled (the only official mention of the decision thus far has been a puff piece on the RD generally, that implies that no decision to run a list 3 rookies short was ever made) also leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It speaks of an ongoing attitude at the Swans of paying bare lip-service to actually being a Sydney team (as in: connected to and representative of the city), rather than an AFL team that happens to be plonked in Sydney.

I was recently listening to SEN before the draft who were talking to a bloke from Champion Data who had done some research on 07 year figures into how much it costs (not including salary) to put a player on the park at each club when you take into account coaching, medical, fitness, travel, clothing, food etc.

It comes in at a staggering $120,000 worth of development costs per year on average per player. That's whether you are a senior, rookie or scholarship holder and does not include salary.

If you're talking about all football-related costs, then that figure would be easy to calculate: take the number of players on a club's list and divide it into the total non-salary costs of the club's footballing dep't. That's prone to be misleading in the context of a debate about 'how much do 3 more cost?', though: the bolded costs above are more or less fixed costs (you're already paying coaches and team doctors, already maintaining a gym and running an exercise program) where the incremental additional cost of having 3 more bodies who are accessing the resources, is very small. None (or little) of that money will be saved by leaving the spots vacant. And when you look at the balance of the headings: saving on a few team track-suits, jumpers and boots, a few more snags at the team barbie and another spot on the bus to Canberra, hardly seems a compelling financial reason to leave the spots vacant.

[chammond]

But the only 'risk' is the drain on resources, and compared with the footballing budget of the club generally, it's pitiful.

I can understand the various arguments you're making, but your basic premise can't be right.

If the incremental cost of rookies was as trivial as you claim there would be no need for the AFL to limit list sizes, and every team would take 20, 30, 40 rookies just in case there was a James Hird in the mix somewhere. If the variable cost of each extra rookie is significant (maybe not $120,000, but certainly much more than the basic wage) then your whole argument is specious. I suspect that, in reality, saving three rookie spots will go a long way towards covering the $300,000 loss made by the Swans.