Opinion 2024 AFL SuperCoach Planning Thread
- Thread starter MC's Mix
- Start date
@Merv Neagle
From pre-season reports at the Hawks so far, one possibility for DPP is Hardwick becoming DEF/FWD this year. He has spent a lot of time with the forwards this pre-season, including in match sims.
Bit surprised with that one, as he is one of our better defenders, but apparently he was quite a good forward as a junior before getting drafted.
From pre-season reports at the Hawks so far, one possibility for DPP is Hardwick becoming DEF/FWD this year. He has spent a lot of time with the forwards this pre-season, including in match sims.
Bit surprised with that one, as he is one of our better defenders, but apparently he was quite a good forward as a junior before getting drafted.
Harmes was borderline best 22 at the dees much better than some credit him with ,tags well and multi skilled
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1735570387079942371
Free hit is, imo, by far the worst option. Really the only case for it is for those who just love utter chaos and carnage but it makes no sense for those hosting as they'll lose half the teams before the season even properly starts.
IMO the order of the best options is:
DGR with no bye concessions in the early byes - Clear first and by far the best option. Would create far more options for starting teams, genuine strategy for finding the balance of how many double games you can afford to cover through the byes. The only real negative is that the DGR is the first week rather than a 2nd crack after as that will make structures very hard with how few rookies are likely in that first batch and thus will be forcing very vanilla structures to allow for this.
R0 scores count in the relevant byes - You basically get to lock in a score in those bye rounds but the strategy around what level is worth locking and the like will be very interesting, is say Curnow worth taking for a 160 score? The value of a trade makes trading in those guys more or less cancelled out. Still has the negative of round 0 not being played.
DGR with best 18 - Basically just forces an overload of the DGR guys in the starting side but this in itself could be interesting as the amount of available rookies could force some very interesting changes to those who decide to lock in a lot or too many of the R0 guys.
Best 10/12 - I don't like this at all as it forces you to have at least X players from the R0 teams, while there are plenty of good options, basically forcing everyone to pick at least 10 from those teams for example would mean even more similar sides than ever.
Not counting it at all - Almost does the reverse of the best 10, it makes the r0 guys all but unpickable as starting picks, which means everyone's teams will be heavily focused on a select few sides, aka all the same.
Free hit - As mentioned above, this is by far the worst option, if they went this path I definitely wouldn't play. As someone who has played a lot of daily fantasy (which is what DFS is fyi), in a team of 9 it's not uncommon to be 300 points behind the top sides. Across a team of 22 plus captain, of which 10 would be midprice/rookie players it only takes a couple of bad breaks and your season is over at round 0. Given everyone will have the same vanilla sides at round 1, like always, it's not possible to make back 500+ points at round 0. Basically you could throw a blanket over about 1000 sides come round 1 and know the winner is coming from them. Daily fantasy works because there's no price to pay the next week but it's a terrible way to start a season proper.
In theory a good thing but was a disaster for his fantasy scoring last time.
IMO the order of the best options is:
DGR with no bye concessions in the early byes - Clear first and by far the best option. Would create far more options for starting teams, genuine strategy for finding the balance of how many double games you can afford to cover through the byes. The only real negative is that the DGR is the first week rather than a 2nd crack after as that will make structures very hard with how few rookies are likely in that first batch and thus will be forcing very vanilla structures to allow for this.
R0 scores count in the relevant byes - You basically get to lock in a score in those bye rounds but the strategy around what level is worth locking and the like will be very interesting, is say Curnow worth taking for a 160 score? The value of a trade makes trading in those guys more or less cancelled out. Still has the negative of round 0 not being played.
DGR with best 18 - Basically just forces an overload of the DGR guys in the starting side but this in itself could be interesting as the amount of available rookies could force some very interesting changes to those who decide to lock in a lot or too many of the R0 guys.
Best 10/12 - I don't like this at all as it forces you to have at least X players from the R0 teams, while there are plenty of good options, basically forcing everyone to pick at least 10 from those teams for example would mean even more similar sides than ever.
Not counting it at all - Almost does the reverse of the best 10, it makes the r0 guys all but unpickable as starting picks, which means everyone's teams will be heavily focused on a select few sides, aka all the same.
Free hit - As mentioned above, this is by far the worst option, if they went this path I definitely wouldn't play. As someone who has played a lot of daily fantasy (which is what DFS is fyi), in a team of 9 it's not uncommon to be 300 points behind the top sides. Across a team of 22 plus captain, of which 10 would be midprice/rookie players it only takes a couple of bad breaks and your season is over at round 0. Given everyone will have the same vanilla sides at round 1, like always, it's not possible to make back 500+ points at round 0. Basically you could throw a blanket over about 1000 sides come round 1 and know the winner is coming from them. Daily fantasy works because there's no price to pay the next week but it's a terrible way to start a season proper.
Duggan training with the midfield group in preseason so far 
Have you done the other formats that all have DGR in them? Actually makes for some very interesting strategy but I'm only a fan if they don't make it best 18 in the byes as that's the give in the give/take equation. Basically I like DGR with no bye modification because it's the most strategic with no real negative to it, I'm sure there would be some who get ruined by the captain choice but even then it really should only be one captains score because most would be looping the r0 captain which doesn't put it outside the normal realm of a bad captain score anyway. It definitely is a poor option though if the byes are best 18. To be fair, none of these are what I'd call good options but the AFL has screwed us out of those.
Would love to hear your reasoning for liking the free hit solution. I honestly can't come up with any positive for it outside it being pure chaos that would allow many to just delete their team at round 1 and honestly, that feels like a stretch to even deem positive. I struggle even more because it doesn't even address the byes, price changes or those players being down a score in anyway either.
R0 counts is simply that you pick your team at round 1 but anyone who played in round 0 will have their round 0 score count in their bye instead. That way they're not down a score, there's no need to do anything with those bye rounds, it still counts in cash generation and those players aren't ahead of the curve in that area. You could tweak mechanisms around it, for example they can't be captained in their bye or have to have played the round before, etc., but fundamentally I think this is actually the fairest way to do it. Taking a lesser premium for a good score or using a trade to get a score in would be sufficient cost, imo, to o***et just about any guaranteed score. The only real negative in this, imo, is that if a player that was already strongly in consideration goes boom, that player would be in every side but realistically that's going to happen with all the solutions, DGR you want both their scores, free hit/don't count/best whatever you're going take them anyway if they go hard in round 0. I believe it was either UF or AFL that did something similar using player averages during the COVID stuff for the I want to say Melbourne/Essendon game that got canned, while SC went full asshole and ended anyone's season who had several players from those teams.
IMO the best solutions are those that make the R0 players more viable, that should be the fundamental design target of the system because otherwise we're going to have effectively 10 teams to pick our entire sides from outside of a couple of locks that are in every single side. SC has become incredibly stale because every team looks the same, halving the teams to pick from would only make that a lot worse.
I basically expect that SC will take the lazy option and follow AFLF on this. They've pretty much copied them and not innovated in any way for 5 years so would be a real plot twist if they decided to actually be creative with this problem and try and differentiate and make things fun again.
Would love to hear your reasoning for liking the free hit solution. I honestly can't come up with any positive for it outside it being pure chaos that would allow many to just delete their team at round 1 and honestly, that feels like a stretch to even deem positive. I struggle even more because it doesn't even address the byes, price changes or those players being down a score in anyway either.
R0 counts is simply that you pick your team at round 1 but anyone who played in round 0 will have their round 0 score count in their bye instead. That way they're not down a score, there's no need to do anything with those bye rounds, it still counts in cash generation and those players aren't ahead of the curve in that area. You could tweak mechanisms around it, for example they can't be captained in their bye or have to have played the round before, etc., but fundamentally I think this is actually the fairest way to do it. Taking a lesser premium for a good score or using a trade to get a score in would be sufficient cost, imo, to o***et just about any guaranteed score. The only real negative in this, imo, is that if a player that was already strongly in consideration goes boom, that player would be in every side but realistically that's going to happen with all the solutions, DGR you want both their scores, free hit/don't count/best whatever you're going take them anyway if they go hard in round 0. I believe it was either UF or AFL that did something similar using player averages during the COVID stuff for the I want to say Melbourne/Essendon game that got canned, while SC went full asshole and ended anyone's season who had several players from those teams.
IMO the best solutions are those that make the R0 players more viable, that should be the fundamental design target of the system because otherwise we're going to have effectively 10 teams to pick our entire sides from outside of a couple of locks that are in every single side. SC has become incredibly stale because every team looks the same, halving the teams to pick from would only make that a lot worse.
I basically expect that SC will take the lazy option and follow AFLF on this. They've pretty much copied them and not innovated in any way for 5 years so would be a real plot twist if they decided to actually be creative with this problem and try and differentiate and make things fun again.
I feel the way the AFL has stuffed up the fixture has completely compromised fantasy comp's whichever way Supercoach goes. Whichever option they choose will make some ok with it yet many won't be happy. The AFL could've avoided all this crap if they just set up zero round as either a split round over 2 weekends and made it round 1 or had the other 5 games played in other states on the same weekend as zero round and made it round 1. This would've also avoided the crap byes in rounds 2, 3, 5 and 6 with them keeping the standard byes between round 12 - 15. Me personally, I'd be ok for Supercoach to have the same set up as AFL fantasy with no Supercoach being played during zero round as this will allow everyone to start at the start of round 1 with a fresh playing field. Good luck to everyone and I hope the picker comes out soon as I'm looking forward to start picking my team.