The first of the bye rounds is done and dusted, and we’re back to the ladder being properly skewed by all teams having a non-equal amount of games under their belt.

It was a nightmare weekend for us tipsters, with a string of favourites going under, most obviously Melbourne’s remarkable Sunday afternoon capitulation at the hands of Fremantle.

St Kilda and Carlton likewise came away with excellent wins on the road, while it was a dark weekend for South Australian football as both the Power and Crows got done in concerning fashion.

But the biggest loser of all this weekend was probably the Rising Star Award, with its two biggest frontrunners – Harley Reid and Sam Darcy – both copping suspensions to throw betting for the gong into disarray and leaving it as open a race as we’ve seen in years.

There might have only been seven games, but there’s just as much to talk about as ever. Let’s begin.

1. Fantastic Freo silence the doubters

I wasn’t quite as bullish about Fremantle’s prospects this year as Dem Panopoulos was when he wrote on Friday about giving the Dockers more respect.

And then they went and absolutely towelled up Melbourne in Alice Springs for their most emphatic – and probably best – win under Justin Longmuir, that leaves them with the second-best percentage in the competition and suddenly entrenched inside the eight.

The Dockers have been a victim in the last 18 months of becoming a finals team – and a finals winner – a year earlier than many expected in 2022, which made a disappointing slump in 2023 all the more disheartening.

So far this year, though, they’ve had one proper shocker, the Derby against West Coast, while losing two games in Adelaide by 10 points or less – one of them THAT controversial one against Carlton – and been beaten by Sydney in a game you can basically write off as irrelevant given it happened just hours after the tragic death of Cam McCarthy.

The Dockers were sensational against the Demons. Their ball movement was brisk without being kamikaze, their skills by foot exquisite, and the midfield utterly dominant in blowing a star-studded Melbourne on-ball brigade to kingdom come with 48 clearances to 23.

Sometimes Freo’s patience with ball in hand can lead to criticism of being over-cautious, especially when Luke Ryan and Jordan Clark rack up the uncontested marks – but no one’s dismissing their 33 combined grabs when the team kicks 22 goals.

This is still one of the AFL’s youngest teams, and one only going in one direction – up. Regardless of what the rest of the season brings, and at this point a home final is a hugely attainable goal, it’s worth keeping in mind that 2026 or even 2027 is likely when the team as a whole will hit its peak.

They couldn’t have dominated so comprehensively without the Demons having an absolute howler of a day at the office, which is worth taking into account when you assess the 92-point victory margin for both teams. Melbourne are unlikely to be that bad again anytime soon.

But given how quickly everyone seems to be to stick the boots into Freo when it goes wrong, it’s worth noting this: Longmuir has responded to what wasn’t working to start 2023, changed their style, coached boldly, and returned this team back to about the level it was at when they broke out in 2022. Not a lot of coaches have the gumption to do what he’s done.

The Dockers still have five matches against the current top eight, plus the Demons again, and a tough match following next week’s bye against the Western Bulldogs. It’s a tough run home – but if what they showed on Sunday is any indication, they’re more than up to the challenge.

2. Sam Darcy’s dog act deserved more weeks

Given Brayden Maynard’s history, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the reaction to him getting poleaxed by Sam Darcy on Friday night was more vindictive than it would have been had literally any other player in the AFL been the one to cop it.

I can understand some of that response: Maynard is a broadly disliked footballer outside Collingwood supporters for his uncompromising, aggressive style of play, and the double hit of him ending Angus Brayshaw’s career and suffering no consequences for their infamous collision in last year’s finals series, irrespective of the legality of that incident at the time, means any injury barring a major one he sustains on the field is going to cause celebration in some corners.

Think Matthew Scarlett putting one on Hayden Ballantyne’s chin in that 2012 game, when the reaction among most footy fans was that he had it coming.

All the same, some of the response to the Darcy incident has been ridiculous: whatever you make of Maynard as a footballer and as a person, in this case he was the victim of a dog act. And a horrendous one at that.

Comparisons to Maynard’s own hit on Brayshaw are hilariously off the mark: even if you believe, like I do, that the Magpie should have been suspended for his careless conduct in that incident, there should be an obvious difference between a split-second decision to brace for contact midway through the football action of attempting to smother, and sucker-punching a bloke from behind to try and make him earn a mark.

I have no doubt that was what was going through Darcy’s head when he clattered into Maynard’s back, having made not even a token attempt to mark or spoil the footy. This was a snipe, and had he hit anyone else the social media reaction would have been one of universal disdain and condemnation.

In all honesty, the incident deserved a month-long sanction: Darcy’s act was just as dangerous as Peter Wright’s collision with Harry Cunningham with far more culpability and fewer mitigating circumstances, and that he didn’t quite hit the back of Maynard’s head hard enough to concuss him is more good fortune than anything else.

Our game is plenty hard enough without petty thuggery like this, and while I can broadly understand Luke Hodge’s point on SEN on Saturday about the need for key forwards like Darcy to show aggression, there’s a difference between throwing one’s weight around and crossing the line so completely.

Darcy will serve his two weeks, come back, and continue to excel as he builds what will likely be a long and outstanding career. As for the rest of us, it’s worth taking a second to consider whether our reaction to what he did is fuelled by a legitimate perspective of the ugliness of the act, or more by the fact we don’t like the bloke he did it to.

3. The holding the ball crackdown is an entirely predictable farce

It was forecast during the week, and the umpires didn’t disappoint this weekend when it came to cracking down on holding the ball.

Especially on Friday night and Saturday afternoon, players were repeatedly pinged with zero prior opportunity, with some penalised for trying to break through tackles and others made to pay for having arms pinned with no escape.

It’s such a seismic change that there was always going to be inconsistency, and for what it’s worth, the umpires, for the most part, judged the new interpretation well.

But it’s both ridiculous that the AFL asked them to do this to ‘fix’ a law that simply wasn’t broken, and it’s to the detriment of the game that it’s now borderline better to be the tackler than the ball-winner in any given situation.

Worst still has been the way the footy media, especially its TV broadcasters, have had nothing but praise for the new interpretation, with friendly talking heads repeatedly discussing how it’s actually great for the game despite a mountain of evidence in front of their eyes that it’s anything but.

Alarmingly on Saturday night, Geelong, the masters at using the laws to their advantage for more than a decade now, seemed to collectively hold off repeatedly on going after the ball, instead waiting for their Richmond opponents to take it before wrapping them up, and regularly benefitting from it.

If other teams make a similar observation, then we’ve got a serious problem, and that will of course require another massive overcorrection from the AFL, the league that can never leave well enough alone.

I thought it was a pretty standard view that the increased focus on tackling and pressure from clubs has directly contributed to the game becoming slower, more congested, and less high-scoring. So why on earth would we be making any change to the rules, let alone mid-season, to allow them to be more rewarded?

The reward for most tackles should be a stoppage and the loss of possession for the opposition – holding the balls should only be awarded as a punishment for poor play or incorrect disposal with prior opportunity for the person being tackled.

That onus of responsibility has now totally flipped, and farcically so.

Holding the ball has always been the most vibes-based of AFL rules, because every umpire’s – and fan’s – judgement of what consists ‘prior opportunity’ and a ‘genuine attempt’ are different.

Now, we’ve got an even more complex set of rules that invites even more inconsistency – and ones you’d think are obvious holding the balls, like Nick Daicos’ on Friday night, are still slipping through the cracks while fifteen or more far less egregious examples are getting punished. It’s maddening.

We’ve now got a situation where players are actively discouraged from trying to do what Harley Reid has captivated us all by doing to start his career – busting tackles.

If the AFL actually wanted to crack down on something that is actually having a negative impact on the game, rather than listening to coaches who have consistently proved their priority is making the game easier to manage rather than improving it aesthetically, then why not start punishing players who hold or impede opposition midfielders, especially the superstars, at centre bounces? Nick Daicos, Marcus Bontempelli and Christian Petracca, among others, cop this treatment every week, but it seems nobody cares enough to do anything about this blight on the game.

The AFL’s holding the ball crackdown has turned an already messy but fundamentally sound rule into an inconsistent, overly officious mess in which players are punished for doing things we enourage schoolkids to do from their first games.

Even for a league who have made a habit of tweaking the game without thinking about the consequences, this is a horrific misstep – and I can’t wait to see it blow up in their faces big time when something particularly controversial happens on a big stage.

4. The Crows – and Matthew Nicks – have reached breaking point

You can tell from the reaction on social media after their loss to Hawthorn on Saturday that Adelaide fans’ patience with their slow and steady rebuild under Matthew Nicks is beginning to wear thin.

At the midpoint of the season the Crows sit 14th, entrenched in the bottom six despite a handy percentage with just four wins and a draw – with so many teams competing for finals, it’s all but impossible to see them recovering to make it to September.

The positive for Nicks is that should the season continue on this trajectory, it will be the first time the Crows haven’t improved year on year in his tenure. The negative is that the gains have been, for the most part, so incremental that this step back fills so seismic by comparison.

It’s hard to put a time frame on rebuilds, especially ones as comprehensive as the one Nicks initiated when he arrived at West Lakes at the end of 2019, but my personal rule of thumb is this: I’m yet to see a club for which finals in their third season under a new coach isn’t an achievable goal.

Call it the ‘Clarkson metric’, because that’s how long it took Alastair Clarkson to take Hawthorn from rock bottom at the end of 2004 back to September in 2007.

This is Nicks’ fifth season at the helm, and it seems certain it will be five from five finals misses. Of coaches in the last 15 years, only Alan Richardson at St Kilda made it to a sixth year with a record like that, and he was axed midway through it.

There are actually a lot of comparisons between Nicks’ Crows and Richardson’s Saints: both took over with the club well and truly on the way down after a period of success, began a slow and steady rebuild, and just when it seemed like they were on the verge of becoming a power again, collapsed suddenly and dishearteningly to erode years of patience in a matter of weeks.

It should be unacceptable for a footy club as powerful as the Crows, one that from 2005 to 2017 made nine of 13 finals series, to be mired in mediocrity the way they are now. Remember, this is a club that sacked Brenton Sanderson for two ho-hum seasons in missing the eight in 2013 and 2014, and went on to be vindicated with three consecutive finals series and a grand final run in 2017 before a famous capitulation.

There’s talent at the Crows, and plenty of it – and they’ve had more than their fair share of misfortune over the last two seasons. But even without Izak Rankine, losing so comprehensively to a Hawthorn team that started their own ground-up rebuild two seasons after theirs and already are every chance of fulfilling that ‘Clarkson metric’ in Sam Mitchell’s third season is a damning indictment on a team that more must be expected of.

Nicks is contracted until the end of 2026. He won’t make it that far unless his team starts winning, fast.

5. It’s time to ditch the ‘fairest’ clause in Rising Star Award – and the Brownlow

Within 24 hours, the 2024 Rising Star Award was turned on its head this weekend.

First, Sam Darcy made himself ineligible with his hit on Brayden Maynard (see Point 2); then, less than a day later, Harley Reid’s status as the unbackable favourite saw all betting for the award suspended when he slung Darcy Wilson to the ground.

We’ve seen Rising Star frontrunners ineligible due to suspension before – the most famous example is Corey McKernan polling the most votes in the 1994 award while unable to win it, but Toby Greene would also have gone extremely close in 2012 but for the first in a loooong line of bans – but it’s certainly unique to have not one but two frontrunners wiped out of the race in the space of one round.

Naturally, the calls have begun to remove that eligibility criteria – and it’s 100 per cent spot on.

Just as with the Brownlow Medal, it’s time to remove the ‘fairest’ component from the medal, because the modern game is far harsher with suspensions than was intended when that criteria was first added.

One ugly tackle does not change the fact Reid is a star on the rise and an entirely fair player, and the same goes for Darcy: all their ineligibility does is ensure whoever does end up winning the award now will have the biggest asterisk in Rising Star history attached to it.

It’s enough of a punishment to be suspended, and make those awards that much harder to win by virtue of missing a game or two, to not need the extra whack of being ineligible for the game’s most prestigious awards for incidents that would have been fine and dandy back when the ‘fairest’ criteria was first established. Even as little as 10 years ago, neither Darcy nor Reid would have been suspended for what they did.

The race is run now, and it would be manifestly unfair to change the criteria mid-season; but what has happened this weekend, and the impact it will have on how we all perceive the eventual winner of the award come year’s end, is a timely reminder that ruling suspended players out of contention for awards has the potential to make the whole thing a farce.

6. Calling out the AFLW’s embarrassing fixture

The AFLW’s newly released fixture for the 2024 season has copped plenty of criticism from fans already – and it’s easy to see why.

Some of the scheduling decisions the league has made are truly incredible, most obviously in four separate lots of matches on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, including a Hawthorn-Gold Coast game in Frankston at 5:15pm on a Tuesday.

There’s simply no way the men’s competition would ever have a draw like this, and when combined with the regular four-day breaks such a schedule necessitates, how it was ever ticked off is even more appalling.

To do something like this and ignore the actual request for a fuller season by the players involved makes it doubly insulting, too.

It’s honestly time for the league to decide whether it wants to put up or shut up with the AFLW, because for all their claims that they care about women’s football and want to see it grow, it seems like they consistently treat it as an afterthought without giving it the space, time and resources it needs to properly thrive.

It’s a great boon to the AFL’s PR department to have a women’s competition up and running – but is that all the AFL cares about? If it wasn’t, then maybe we wouldn’t be seeing Tuesday even matches starting on the cusp of working hours that the vast, vast majority of fans won’t have a hope in hell of attending, or even watching it all on TV.

Random thoughts

– Nick Daicos’ 27 contested possessions is both unreal and a sign the Dogs were actually able to clamp him more effectively than most clubs. You’d 100 per cent prefer him getting most of his touches on the inside rather than the outside.

– Whatever Sam Switkowski had for breakfast Sunday morning, he should consider making it a habit.

– Harley Reid’s reaction to Marcus Windhager’s second-half tag should confirm any serious teams send someone to him for the rest of the season.

– If Rory Lobb does indeed want a trade, it’s probably in his interests to be significantly more competitive than he was on Friday night.

– If I’m Richmond I’m paying Liam Baker whatever he needs to stay at Punt Rd. The best player at the club and only Shai Bolton comes close.