2024 saw the creation of our 2nd three time premiership winner – Ararat. In a dominant display, the team went 19-1 for the year, their only loss coming in FU round 15 (AFL round 19) when they faced the Crocs. Not surprisingly, the 2 weeks that Gawn was out (AFL rounds 18 and 19), the team won by just 25 points, then lost by 33. When he came back in AFL round 20, Gawn scored 97 and the team won by 334 points. But before we get in to team specifics, let’s start with a look at the overall league for 2024. 2024 was a year of more high scores, more low scores, bigger margins, and ironically the second lowest total points scored over the home and away season. I’ll talk more about this later. To potentially add more fuel to the fire (if such a fire exists), I’m going to show the table of average scores by points for rank which was a talking point in the thread about rule changes. To remind us, this table ranks each team by the total points they scored over the 17 H&A rounds and shows the average that team scored over the year. The 2 blanks that we see in 2015 and 2016 just mean that 2 teams finished on exactly the same total points for. So for 2015, 2 teams were equal 10th. The average of the top ranked team increased by 40 points per round compared to the top ranked team last year. The only other teams to see their average increase from 2023 were those ranked 8th and 10th. A total of 15 out of 18 teams saw their average score drop when ranked against the equivalent ranked team last year. Now, 9 of these 15 teams have a change in average score of within 20 points. The biggest changes are for the teams ranked 18th (269 point decrease), 17th (93 points), 2nd (70 points), 16th (68 points) and 15th (45 points). The below chart highlights the top 4 teams (blue) and bottom 4 (red/brown) and how their average score has fared over the 11 years of FU. We can see a massive swing down and an increase by the best team. That yellow line is the 8th ranked team On top of that, the difference between the average score of the top scoring team and the average score of the bottom scoring team blew out to 675 point this year. That’s 155 points higher, or over a third (37%) more than the previous biggest difference we saw in 2021. What gives? I don’t think there are elite scoring free agents that we’ve left sitting on the sidelines. Yes the difference between top and bottom has worsened, but I’m going to hazard a guess that this is due to prudent list management for the most part. Exmouth did a press release over a year ago that they were deliberately rebuilding. Maybe the other bottom teams are doing the same thing? Without a realistic shot at winning the premiership, maybe they are wanting to get to the bottom faster and pick up elite youngsters with the hope of seeing a quicker turnaround than other teams have previously (such as Pakenham and Cow Bay). Maybe those middle teams are not wanting to let go of certain players with hopes that they'll do better but they don't. But I’ve sidetracked myself, back to FU review stuff.
The biggest improvers this year have been Coolgardie (up 7 places, 6 more wins and an increase of 89 points in their average score), Eden and Horsham. Our bottom 2 sides last year (Eden and King Island), both improved by 6 positions this year. At the other end of the scale, Exmouth crashed to 18th with a 308 point drop in their average score. Interestingly, we only saw 1 change in the top 8 this year compared to last year: In Coolgardie, Out Staghorn Flat. In the most dominant display we’ve seen by a team, Ararat was ranked in the top 2 points scored for every position. The closest team in terms of dominance is Nuytsland of 2017 when they were ranked top 4 across every line. Although the Ararat defence and forwards slipped to second, the mids and rucks improved by 5 and 6 ranks respectively. The best defence this year was held by Cow Bay while the best forwards are out in Serengeti. No team saw improvement across every line, except Eden came close with the rucks not getting worse. Just one team saw declines across every line, Exmouth. The below box plot looks at the middle 50% of scores for each team (the box), the median team score (the line in the box) and the top and bottom 25% of team scores (the dashed vertical lines extending from the box). Ararat was clearly head and shoulders above every team this year with a median score of 1,437. The next best was Korumburra with a median of 1,310, a 127 point difference. Exmouth was clearly below every other team this year with a median of just 763 points, 219 points lower than the next best (or worst). Carnamah and King Island both had the 2 biggest ranges in scores throughout the year while Coolgardie has the smallest. Including finals matches, all of Ararat, Groote and Korumburra played their 200th matches towards the back end of this year. Ararat surpassed 150 wins this year and Groote is 8 wins off that mark. Serengeti, Staghorn and Pakenham also passed 100 wins, while King Island and Coolgardie just need 2 more to hit 100 wins. Exmouth needs another 12 wins but looks very unlikely to get there in 2025, and Bueng Kan needs to go 14-3 in 2025 to get to 100 wins. Bueng Kan, Carnamah, Christmas Island, Exmouth and Hughenden, all recorded their 100th loss this year. Coolgardie, King Island, Pakenham and Staghorn are all at risk of getting to 100 losses in 2025. Ararat secured their 3rd FU premiership, Exmouth secured their first wooden spoon. In a highly touted draft, Exmouth will pick up some elite talent for their troubles.
As mentioned previously, we saw more high score and more low scores this year. We saw an average score of 1,162 per team over the H&A season this year and while it’s (only) 35 points less per team per round than last year, that adds up to around 11,000 points over the 17 rounds. We haven’t seen such a low amount of points scored since the covid affected year of 2020. 4 new entries appeared in the top 30 H&A season points scored with Ararat being the first ever team to break the 24,000 point barrier over 17 games. Exmouth recorded the lowest ever point scored over the H&A season while Christmas Island of 2024 slots in at number 8. 5 new entries appear in the top 30 weekly scores. Ararat’s 1,626 point effort against Bueng Kan in round 2 wasn’t enough to take first place but was good enough for 3rd. 3 more Ararat efforts from this year appear in the top 25 and Korumburra’s 1,509 points from round 16 saw them appear at equal 26th. 10 new entries appear in the bottom 30 weekly scores, 8 by Exmouth. Exmouth hadn’t appeared in this list until 2024. 3 of this year’s top 4 also appear in the top 30 highest final scores we’ve seen. Not surprisingly, Ararat appears in 1st, while Pakenham and Korumburra also put in some fine performances at some stage in those last 3 weeks. Coolgardie got knocked out in the first week of finals for the 4th time in their history and also appear at number 20 in the 30 lowest finals scores. Aligned with the fact that we’ve had fewer total points scored this year, just 3 matches made the top 30 highest match aggregates this year compared to 8 matches appearing in the 30 lowest match aggregates. We also saw some big margins with 7 matches appearing in the 30 biggest margins, 6 involving a match with Exmouth. We saw some big margins too, including the biggest margin ever recorded in a FU match. Do I need to mention Exmouth again? 4 teams from this year’s top 8 appear in the 30 longest winning streaks with Ararat equaling their effort from 2018 with 14 wins in a row. The only team they lost to, Cow Bay, (yes I had to get that in there again) recorded 7 wins in a row in the first 7 rounds. Carnamah’s 13 game losing streak ended with a win in round 10 while Exmouth started a 16 game losing streak in round 2 this year that is still running.
Finally, some additional club records showing highest/lowest scores, biggest winning/losing margins, and highest/lowest match aggregates appear next.
Thank you all for another great year of FU. If there's anything I've missed or you'd like to see, feel free to let me know. Also a shout out to @YAD69 for providing me with the scores that he downloaded from the site every week. That saved me a heap of time and a heap of stress trying to get this done before the finals fixture got uploaded and wiped all the H&A scores.
Great analysis @fresh It appears I need to clean house a bit further and wait about 3 to 5 years to make finals!