Alright, weve been talking a lot about structures recent. Mainly because you can review teams until youre blue in the face, but until youve seen the NAB, combined with whats happened over the pre-season, it can all blow up in your face.

Thank goodness that the NAB starting this weekend though!

But! Thats not what Im wanting to talk about here. No, what Im wanting to do is discuss the merits of the Gun and Rookies (GnR) approach, over the mid-pricers approach.

Now, I can already here some of you thinking- "But I plan to have a mixture of the two strategies", but for the sake of this article, if youre looking at running less than 4 rookies on the field, youre mid-pricing.

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So, your typical GnR team is gunna look like this
BAC- 5 prems, 2 rookies (Yes, Otten is cheaper than Swallow- hes a rookie)
MID- 2/3 Premiums, 3/4 rookies
RUC- 1/2 Premiums, 1/0 Mid pricers (Hi Petrie!)
FWD- 5 Premiums, 1 Cheapie, 1 Rookie.

In short, you got a bunch of premiums and an absolute minimum amount of midpricers.

Meanwhile, a midprice squad comes in two flavours, either they are stacked full of your true mid-priced players- your Foleys, Cotchens, Zaharakis, Knights- or they are the hybrid team that still has a fair few rookies, but is cheaping out on the premiums, drafting a division of players know as sub-premiums (Or Jabroni Premiums, depending on what circles you travel.)

Now, historically, these methods have both been viable options, but I want to run through a couple of numbers to show just how difficult it actually is to pull of a mid-priced squad these days.

Ok, consider the following statistics-

Last year, Barlow increase his average by a massive 95

Pods increased his by 76.

3 players increased by 60+, all rookies.

17 players increased by 50+, The only non-rookies were Waters and Connors. Both however were cheaper than Swallow this year, so Im gunna count them as rookies due to their pricing.

28 players increased by 40+ points. The only non rookies were Malceski and Mumford. Both excellent picks.

28 players increased by 30+, The non rookies were Staker, Hannebery, Macaffer, Leroy Jetta, Jack Mckenzie and Kepler Bradley.

Now, this is where its interesting, picking these guys, while great- is really hard. And even then, the only keeper of the lot was Jack- and thats as a #6 barely. Further to that though, how many of these boys were on anyones radar last year?

55 players increased by 20+. A good half of them were genuine midprice improvers.
Jacobs, Burgoyne, McDonald, Sidebottom, Hodge, Hunt, Ballantyne, Garlett, Logan, Hanley, Adams, Steven, Riewoldt, Rischitellu, McEvoy, Leuenberger, Hille, Edwards, Murphy, Ladson, Mayne, L. Brown, Thomas, Wells, Franklin, Daisy, Doughlas and Greenwood.

Now, this is where the value lives. Finding the Sub-premiums that break into premiums. Some are obvious, ala Hodge and Franklin. But when you consider the amount of players priced between $300k and $500k, these guys are still just a tiny handful. And for the most part, these guys will *still* reqire an upgrade. So there is still value in picking up Jabroni Premiums, but its difficult.

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Increase
total
Rookies
Non-Rookies



90+
1 (1)
1 (1)
0



70+
1 (2)
1 (2)
0



60+
3 (5)
3 (5)
0



50+
17 (22)
17 (22)
0



40+
28 (40)
26 (38)
2 (2/40)



30+
28 (68)
21 (59)
7 (9/68)



20+
55 (123)
27 (86)
28 (35/123)




In short, what we see here is that picking a genuine mid-price improver that is going to value enough to make your team some decent coin- or at least, do enough on the field, is a very difficult thing to do. In short, of the 500+ players who were priced above rookie price, only 1% of those are going to make it worth your while (30+ increase), with a whole 6% looking to increase by 20+.

Meanwhile, youve got a 30% hit rate on rookies increasing by 20+, 20% at 30+ and over 10% of all rookies increasing by more than 40+

Combine that with the fact that you also have a long line of bench positions to fill, and extra trades to fix any mistakes, means that youre gunna have to mess up pretty badly to not hit a bucketload of gold in those rookies.

Now, salary is one thing, but SuperCoach is all about points. So lets take a look at the effect of points.

Say I have a fairly golden run with a mid-ish priced strategy. All my Jabroni Prems (10) go up by 10 each and my 5 midpricers go up by 20. (Ive also got a couple of real prems which keep their average, and a pair of the highest scoring rookies which cancel out with the other guy.)

So in that, youre looking at- on field, getting an increase of 200ppg on your initial spend. Keep in mind, it is extremely difficult to achieve this kind of perfection in a starting list.

Next up comes our typical GnR guy. Now, lets make his a little more realistic. Hes got 14 premiums, 2 midpricers and 6 rookies (though well go with 4- again, taking out the top 2 that the other guy had.)

Now, 14 premiums breaking even across the board is probably a likely thing to happen, some go up- some go down, we know theyll lose salary but thats ok.

Next, the 2 mid pricers/Cheapies - well give them a conservative 15 ppg increase each (considering they were the "pick" of the midpriced bunch)

Next, well take our 4 rookies, including the 11 that we have on the bench and apply the above logic to them. (keeping in mind that this is simply closing your eyes and picking rookies out of a hat- not hand choosing the best of the best.)

Now, 30% of our 15 rookies will score an increase of 20+, so thats 5. 20% will score more than 30+ - which is 3. while 10% is going to score an increase of over 40+

So lets add that up. 1 40+, 2 30+ and a 20+ player all on the field.

Combine that with the two midpricers and youre looking at an increase of 150ppg. From closing your eyes and taking a random selection of rookies. Choose wisely and I cant see why you wouldnt be looking at 190ppg increase. Versus 200ppg from a near perfect selection of midpricers.

Further adding fuel to this fire is the Gold Coast and the delicious rookies they are beinging to the table- with the offsetting nature that the Sub rule could be wrecking havoc on our rookies.

All in all though, I think the idea of running a midpriced team is getting harder and harder to stay competitive with as everyone tries to squeeze every last inch of points out of their team.