The Best AFL Coaches Might Not Be the Most Decorated Ones
Do AFL Boards keep failing the Senior Coach interview and selection process?
Every time an AFL senior coaching vacancy opens up, the same pattern plays out.
Somehow the media produces a top 10-20 shortlist. Boards engage executive search firms. Psychometric testing is commissioned. Cultural checks are run. References are done at scale.
On paper, it looks like a sophisticated hiring processes for any senior leadership role. Yet since 2000, 67 individuals have stepped into an AFL senior coaching role. Exactly 48 of them have already been chewed up and spat out by the system, often leaving a trail of costly contract payouts and broken club cultures in their wake. A 4.1 year medan survival rate means boards are guessing every 4 seasons.
In reality, despite the high importance, recruiting a senior coach in the Australian Football League should be one of the simple executive recruitment decisions.
Unlike almost any other leadership hire, the insight on the candidate pool is extraordinary.
Imagine if when you hired your last leader, you had total line of sight of these facts.
Every candidate has operated in the public eye and under your eye for well over a decade.
You have elite reference density.
Players, coaches, performance staff and administrators (past and present) are all accessible.
You have the deep performance data, captured in detail by modern analytics.
You immediately have a quality long-list of at least 50 to narrow down to short-list.
So why do so many appointments still miss?
Despite all this information, evidence suggests that AFL boards repeatedly fall back on one flawed non-negotiable:
The Premiership Success Criteria.
No doubt boards set this as a key criteria. Has the successful candidate won a flag as a player? OR were they part of a recent dynasty as an assistant coach with premiership success? Or both.
It feels safe. It feels proven. It feels like 'premiership DNA' for our next successful era.
But is it a classic case of being too narrow in the thinking around the selection criteria for the search?
A premiership tells you a team functioned at an elite level, but it does not isolate individual coaching capability.
And yet it has become one of the most powerful selection filters in the game.
The Premiership Trap
Out of those 67 senior coaches since 2000, I beleive 6 men were appointed with zero elite AFL premiership silverware to their names - meaning without any prior premiership experience as a player or assistant coach at the level. Based on my knowledge, that's David Teague (Carlton), Grant Thomas (St Kilda), Justin Longmuir (Fremantle), Matthew Nicks (Adelaide), Neil Craig (Adelaide) and Peter Rohde (Western Bulldogs). Matthew Primus (Port Adelaide) was captain in a premiership year but was out injured.
Fewer than 10% of candidates in the last 26 years have successfully bypassed this filter.
Clubs are not just selecting for capability, they seem to be selecting for reassurance because in high-pressure environments, often someone who has been there before feels safer than than the unknown, problem being that 'unknown', might be 'exceptional'.
Safety in hiring is not the same as accuracy.
The hidden gems: the unlucky assistants.
Invisible excellence. Is this the biggest blind spot in AFL coach recruitment?
What if the best coaching mind in the system is currently working under a structurally weak senior coach, embedded in a rebuilding club with limited talent or confined to a narrow tactical role inside a rigid system? After all, isn't the assistant limited to the direction of their Senior Coach?
They will never be credited with a premiership. Not because they lack ability, but because they lack exposure to winning conditions.
The system quietly rewards timing and being in successful environment over capability.
A case study in overlooked credentials
This week I heard Seven West journalist Craig O'Donoghue call out the credentials of experienced assistant coach Jade Rawlings. Stripping away the bias and purely looking at the CV:
Played 148 AFL games accross three clubs making it to a preliminary final
Coached across five AFL clubs, including a caretaker period at Richmond
Diversity if markets, coached in VIC, QLD, SA, WA after growing up in TAS
Led teams in multiple leagues and systems, including his own teams
Delivered a VFL Grand Final appearance + was named VFL coach of the year
Coached Norwood to a SANFL premiership with multiple grand final appearances
Coached the SA Representatve State Team
Currently operates as the defensive coach within a top-tier AFL program (the best defensive team currently, the Fremantle Dockers)
Yet despite this breadth and depth, he is rarely featured in the media's top candidates because hasn't touched the AFL premiership?
The deeper hiring mistake
If boards prioritise premiership exposure above everything else, they are not selecting for leadership.
They are selecting for comfort.
But elite coaching is rarely linear:
Many successful coaches are in fact developed inside dynasties
Others are forged inside constraint, instability, and rebuilding environments
Some inherit systems
Others learn how to build them
More broadly in leadership roles, is often the latter group that develops the most transferable leadership skill and perhaps the very best have diverse experience across multiple situations.
Because they’ve had to solve problems and adapt rather than maintain advantage.
A better way to evaluate senior coaches
If AFL boards want to improve hiring accuracy, the question should shift:
Not - Have they been part of a premiership system?
But - What have they built when they didn’t have the best list, the best system, or the best conditions? When things were incredibly tough.
Because that is the actual job.
Not maintaining excellence, but creating it.
Final thought
Until boards stop equating premiership success with coaching capability, I believe they will continue to overlook candidates who are not just ready for the job, but potentially best suited to it.
And so the game will keep recycling the same shortlist 90% of the time… while the best candidates remain just outside it.
Unless coaches like Matthew Nicks or Justin Longmuir can break that pattern, by building, sustaining, and ultimately winning a premiership without the traditional premiership inheritance, and in doing so, quietly redefine what readiness actually looks like.
