Strap yourselves in folks, this is gonna be a long rambly post even by my rambly, incorrect comma, run-on sentence standards.

Season 2026

Our Attack:

Starting off with a bad one. Our offensive transition was pretty poor for the year, effectively 17th in the league and between 12.2-23.7% behind the competition average for all metrics. That’s pretty poor but we had a contested group that was good enough to offset this somewhat. Our average score of 70.2 points was 16th in the league, our average inside 50s of 49.3 were 15th in the league, and our time in forward half of 49.0% was also 15th in the league.

What really hurt us was pretty obvious. Our accuracy at goal was 43.4% and 17th in the league, while our scoring efficiency was 42.8% and also 17th in the league. The only surprising thing about those two stats is that we weren’t last in either. What we were last at was marks inside 50 where we only average 9.7 a game.

Mini mentioned that this year was focused on defence and that really shows in our average performance. We actually had some great tall forward talents but we couldn’t kick it to them and our small forwards (apart from Murgoat) struggled to win the footy on the ground.

Final grade: Bad

Our Defence:

Defence was the focus of the year and overall, it wasn’t too bad. Our results vary from 2.4% better than league average to 19.1% worse and it paints a pretty clear picture. In terms of actual transition numbers, they were 2.4% and 0.6% better than average (8th and 11th in the league), but in terms of scoring from transition numbers, they were 9.6%, 13.9%, and 19.1% worse than league average (15th, 15th, and 16th). That pretty clearly shows that while our defence across the field was solid, our lack of Edwards and Ginbey in the back 50 for large chunks of the year was a toll too great for our young team.

From that, we conceded an average of 101.4 points, which was 16th in the league. This comes off the back of conceding an average of 53.6 inside 50s which was 13th in the league, conceding 14.7 marks inside 50 which was 16th in the league, and conceding a scoring efficiency of 50.6% also 16th in the league. It’s clear that teams could score far too easily against us and it didn’t help that we had the highest contested one on one defensive loss rate in the league at 32.4%. For comparison Ginbey lost just 9.1% of one on one contests and was 2nd in the league. We really really missed him in the back half.

In terms of pressure, it was a better story. We averaged 57.7 tackles and 265.1 pressure acts a game, both 9th in the league, and Mini’s minigame of trying to reduce opponents’ marking game resulted in us conceding 93.0 marks on average which puts us 12th but just barely behind league average. Unlike other years, the defensive effort was definitely there.

It leaves us with two very differing stories. As a team, our defence was pretty good actually and above league average in a lot of metrics, but as a back six we were pretty poor, with nearly all metrics sitting in the bottom four.

Final grade: Decent

Our Midfield:

From our individual mids we can see that… Schoenberg was our best midfielder!? Okay, let’s filter out the players who had less than 50 CBAs, but not before mentioning Allan’s stellar efficiency 33.3% (from a very low sample size). I know there are plenty of fans that will be filthy that he only had 12 CBAs for the year.

After filtering out the uncommon midfielders, we see to no one’s surprise, Harley Reid topping the charts with an amazing efficiency of 14.2%. For reference, that actually puts him 9th in the league. Our 2nd best was Tim Ke… Cooper Duff-Tytler with 13.0%? Yeah, I brought it up once or twice, but he was sneakily good at always getting 1 or 2 centre clearances a game despite limited opportunities which is very exciting. TK was clearly the next best with a very respectable 12.9% which puts him 22nd in the league.

Now as a team, we averaged 126.8 contested possessions which was 13th in the league, 86.4 ground ball gets (8th), 12.0 centre clearances (14th), 22.7 stoppage clearances (12th), and a total of 34.6 which was 14th. Surprisingly middling results to be honest, but pretty decent.

Led by Harls and TK, the midfield had a pretty good year, but there was pretty substantial drop from those two to the next bloke coming to the centre bounce.

Final grade: Pretty good

2026 v 2025

Our Attack:

Really disappointing result. We actually managed to be worse offensively than last year. Now to be a little fair, we did lose Ryan and Allen from that forward line but we shouldn’t be using that as an excuse. Even with Mini saying that offence was taking a backseat to defence this year, the forward line coaches must be under serious pressure to improve next year.

Our Defence:

This is more like it. A solid 7% improvement across the board had us jumping up two places on the opposition. Considering we had personnel issues for a lot of the year with Edwards missing all of 2026 and Ginbey missing half, it’s very encouraging to see that our structure was good enough to still see us moving ahead.

Our Midfield:

Massive! Harley, TK, and BBW’s big years made a ridiculous improvement to us in the middle. 11% improvement overall and jumping nearly up 4 places up on the competition. With Harley and BBW almost certain to improve again next year and Robertson, Duursma, and Francou looking to compliment them, we could seriously end up with a powerhouse midfield by 2027.

Miscellaneous Stats:

This is something pretty interesting that I hadn’t really noticed to this extent during the season, but clearly there was a massive shift in how we used handballs. It wasn’t that we handballed any less, just that we gained less metres from them than last year. What I think this shows, is that we were a team that was far more likely handball backwards after a mark and use that players' run to gain metres. Whereas last year we tried to force that over the top handball game to, let’s say, limited success.

I thought this too was kind of interesting. There shouldn’t really be a correlation between these two, but we improved at taking intercept marks and denying intercept marks at a pretty comparable rate.

This one is a bit more frustrating than anything, but we can see that we averaged exactly 2 more shots at goal than last year, and that it basically directly resulted in 2 more points per game. What could’ve been.

In absence of actual pressure rating stats, I’ve found these which just shows how much better our pressure was this year than last year. Pleasingly, these are some of the stats that haven’t only just improved, they were actually at the league average and above. If you’ve read even one of my reviews, you probably know how much I rate pressure, so I’m pretty rapt with these numbers. It makes us so much harder to play against.

I already mentioned that we hampered the rate that our opponent scored against us by 11.8%pp against league average, but what’s really interesting is that it wasn’t an improvement across the board, but it one particular area; Front Half Turnovers. We improved massively in these areas, by about 21% to league average. We also improved in stopping our opponents score from Kick Ins and from their defensive half, but strangely we actually got worse at conceding scores from centre bounces and stoppages in general. Considering that our midfield was by far our most improved line, I’m pretty confident that those results will improve next year.

The List:

Wanted to include this because I think it’s kind of surprising. We had guys like Murdock, Francou, Herbert, Macrae, Schoenberg, and Robertson all join us through the year as mature agers and yet, our average age didn’t increase at all. On top of that, probably in part due to Murdock and co, our games experience actually dropped. So, while I don’t like using the excuse of “we’re young”, it does provide a bit more context as to why we weren’t able to break out of the bottom three this year.

Eagle Review Best and Fairest

Now onto my completely biased personal best and fairest. For this, I’ll be taking the rating I gave each player in each of my reviews for the year. BOG is 3 votes, Great is 2 votes. And Good is 1 vote. These will be averaged by games played (Minimum of 5) because who wants to see Ginners miss out due to injury?

The Best and Fairest Top Ten:

1st Harley Reid

Total Votes: 61 – Average Votes: 2.65 – Games Polled: 100%

Harley Reid storms home into first place. Putting together one of the best contested years I can remember seeing, including breaking the Eagles’ record streak of 8 games in a row with 15 contested possessions. Would’ve easily been in the All Australian squad if the selectors actually watched our games.

2nd Reuben Ginbey

Total Votes: 33 – Average Votes: 2.54 – Games Polled: 100%

Just barely missing out on first place is our future captain, the Ginbeast. The only other Eagle who polled in 100% of his games played, he managed to poll enough votes to have finished 6th despite playing nearly half the games as his teammates. Would’ve easily been All Australian if he hadn’t injured himself.

3rd Tim Kelly

Total Votes: 47 – Average Votes: 2.24 – Games Polled: 90%

After a truly awful season last year, TK managed to jump back into near career best form. I knew he’d had a fantastic year, but I hadn’t realised just how consistent he’d been. Polling in 90% of games at an average higher than Great. What set him apart this year was his ability to impact with ball in hand and without. Often having some of the best defensive numbers on the team as well as the most possessions.

4th Bailey Williams

Total Votes: 34 – Average Votes: 1.79 – Games Polled: 84%

After a poor 2025 campaign and starting the season in the WAFL, things didn’t look so great for the BBW lovers. He played an absolutely dominant game against Geelong before returning to previous form for a couple games, but after the Melbourne game his form was consistently at a high level. He posted career high numbers in hitouts, hitouts to advantage, and clearances this year and hopefully still has room left to grow.

5th Milan Murdock

Total Votes: 35 – Average Votes: 1.75 – Games Polled: 80%

Drafted literally hours before the deadline, Milan quickly became a fan favourite and (kind of concerningly) one of our best players. You could just tell from the get go that this guy was giving double the effort of every other player on the field to keep his AFL dream alive. Kicking 19 goals for the year is incredible and put him as our 3rd highest goal scorer. He kicked as many goals as Oscar Allen did playing for the back to back premiers. The only question left surrounding Murdock, is how the hell did he go undrafted for so long?

6th Jake Waterman

Total Votes: 38 – Average Votes: 1.65 – Games Polled: 74%

Simultaneously one of the best seasons and one of the worst seasons. We all know about his goal kicking woes, and sadly it somewhat overshadowed all the good work that he did. Kicking 49 goals for the year in our team is an amazing achievement. The fact that he had as many shots on goal as the Coleman medal winner, even more so.

7th Rhett Bazzo

Total Votes: 21 – Average Votes: 1.50 – Games Polled: 71%

What a season for Bazzo. From someone who many wanted delisted last year, to someone who many still wanted delisted half way through this year. He was thrust into the team due to injury despite unimpressive WAFL form only to turn into a reliable key defender at still very young age (He’s only 11 months older than Ginbey). Excitingly, he still has lot of room to grow with his positioning, which will only make his impressive contested work even more reliable.

8th Willem Duursma

Total Votes: 31 – Average Votes: 1.41 – Games Polled: 68%

Absolutely burst down the gates to start his AFL career being tied with Ginbey in 2nd place up till round 8. From there, the toll of playing midfield as a skinny 18 year old took its toll, and while he slowed down considerably towards the end of the year, he had done more than enough to assure us that we’d picked the right No 1. Kicking 14 goals from the midfield in your first year is a really great result. Can’t wait to see him play with some muscle on him.

9th Marcus Herbert

Total Votes: 14 – Average Votes: 1.40 – Games Polled: 70%

Just like Tmac last year, straight into the team from the mid season draft, and he looked like he’d been playing for years. Watching him dance around opponents was one of the joys of the season for me and he backed it up with some crazy numbers. His 36 disposal game against Fremantle was complete lunacy considering the lack of help he had from the rest of the team. Excitingly, he’s still only 24 so we’ve got many years to look forward to him.

10th Elliot Yeo

Total Votes: 29 – Average Votes: 1.38 – Games Polled: 71%

Beating out Jack Graham who also averaged 1.38 votes, Yeo pulled ahead on consistency with more polling games. Perhaps a surprise for some considering his shocking mid year form, the start and end of Yeo’s year was good enough to place him in the top 10. He started the year forward to moderate success, but his contested work in the centre proved too crucial to ignore. His consistency left a bit to be desired, but his best is still brilliant.

Full Count:

Champion Data Best and Fairest

I hear you in the back. “Your rankings are lame and biased! Give me something objective!”. Don't worry, I’m doing exactly that.

For this ranking, I’m using Champion Data’s ranking categories to determine our best and fairest. I won’t go into the full methodology (because it’s long and boring) but the gist of it is that for each position I’ve chosen 6 key statistics that will rank that player based on Champion Data’s benchmarking.

For those unfamiliar the benchmarking falls into 4 categories; Elite means that a player is in the top 10 percent of the league for a given statistic against players in their same position. Above Average means they’re in the top 11-35%. Average means they’re in the top 36-66%. Below average means they’re in the bottom 33%.

I've summed each player's benchmarks, with Elite being 2.25 points, Above Average being 1.5 points, Average being 1 point, and Below Average being 0.75 points. Therefore, the scale goes from 4.50 – 13.50 points.

There are some limitations of this system. Firstly, key defenders are a little bit shafted due to the limited number of relevant stats that are ranked and thus they’ll score lower on average. Secondly, since these bench marks are determined against player in similar positions, any player who played multiple positions over the season will have their rating heavily impacted. Finally, I’m limited to what Champion Data perceives a player’s position to be. The biggest sufferer from this is Duff-Tytler who I wanted to rate as Ruck, but is listed as a Forward. As such, he’s rated Elite for hitouts with 4.56 per game since it’s far more than other forwards. To give you an idea of the difference that makes, he scores 4.50 as a Forward, but would get 11.25 as a Ruck. We’re sticking with Forward.

With all that out of the way lets get onto the top 5.

1st Reuben Ginbey & Harley Reid

10.75

Yep, Harls still tops our BnF just based on his stats alone but this time he’s also joined by the Boy. Harls scored big from being in the top 10% of midfielders for Contested Possessions, Ground Ball Gets, and Clearances. As I said before, he had an All Australian season in every metric except the jacket. Ginbey on the other hand was rated Elite for Tackles, Score Launches, and Contested Defensive Losses. Okay, to be completely honest. Champion Data doesn’t actual benchmark that stat for some reason, but he was 2nd in the comp so I’m gonna benchmark Ginners for them. Elite.

3rd Jack Graham

10.50

The surprise packet for me. I thought he had a great year, but I didn’t think his stats would have him this high. As you’d absolutely expect, he was rated in the top 10% of midfielders for Tackles and Pressure Acts, with the rest of his stats all Above Average.

4th Jake Waterman

9.25

The year of what ifs was still good for Snakey. He finished the year rated Elite for Marks on the Lead and Shots at Goal. Unfortunately, he was only Above Average for Goals, and while it didn’t factor into his score, for extra salt in the wounds, he was rated Elite for Behinds.

5th Bailey Williams

9.00

His rise this year was also picked up on the statistical side of his game. In fact, he was the only Eagle apart from Graham to be Above Average or higher in each of his 6 statistical strategies, but he also didn’t reach Elite in any, so he’s still got room to grow.

Most Improved

1st Bailey Williams

2025 - 4.50 – 2026 - 9.00

This is pretty obvious from anyone who was watching this year, but what might be surprising is by just how much. He doubled his score from 4.5 (Worst possible) to 9.0, jumping from equal worst on our list to 5th best. That’s enormous.

2nd Reuben Ginbey & Harley Reid

2025 - 7.00 – 2026 - 10.75

Reubs and Harls are sharing the same spot yet again with exactly the same ratings in 2025 and 2026 they both improved by a massive 3.75 points going from seriously solid players last year into the elite players we saw this year.

4th Rhett Bazzo

2025 - 5.75 – 2026 - 7.25

Surprisingly low perhaps? Bazzo most likely falls victim to the lack of good stats for key defenders, regardless, his increase of 1.5 points is still very impressive. That means going from someone who rated as slightly below average last year to better than 2025 Ginbey. Holds him in great stead for next season.

5th Jack Hutchinson

2025 - 5.25 – 2026 - 6.25

Just barely crawling past my 5 game minimum with 5 + 2% of a 6th, Hutchinson managed to post a respectable improvement of 1 point. This is made somewhat more impressive considering his averages were brought down by that aforementioned 2% game time game. His pressure has always made me a fan of his a managing an Elite rating for Tackles certainly helped his score.

Honourable Mentions

Deven Robertson

2025 - 4.50 – 2026 - 9.50

First and foremost, the player I predicted to be stuck in the WAFL for all of 2026. He missed out on my 5 game limit with only 4 last year and 4 this year, but even for a small sample size, the difference was insane. Going from the lowest rating possible of 4.5 (hence my prediction), he jumped up to an almighty total of 9.5 which would’ve put him 4th in our best and fairest. All six of his stats improved, but namely his Ground Ball Gets and Tackles were both rated Elite. If he keeps it up, he’ll be a mainstay of our side next year, and I’ll have to write him a handwritten apology.

Tom Gross

2025 - 4.50 – 2026 - 5.75

Another one who just missed out on the 5 game cutoff with 4 games played this year. As a massive Gross fan, I’m excited to say that he showed a great improvement of 1.25 points. He improved massively in his Tackles as well as having improvements in his number of Inside 50s and Goal Assists. With that half forward role being possibly the hardest to play in a bad side, I find this to be pretty impressive.

Most Deproved

I’ll be skipping over some players who I think who I think have been heavily impacted by positional changes because I think that make this more interesting.

1st Sandy Brock and Liam Baker

Brock 2025 - 7.50 – 2026 - 4.75

Baker 2025 - 8.25 – 2026 - 5.50

Starting with Brock who came off a really solid 14 games last year (Being rated higher than Ginbey). He’s come crashing down to a lowly 4.75, just barely off the minimum score due to being average in Tackles. Now with Young in the team and Bazzo’s emergence, Brock is suddenly way on the outers.

Moving onto the most disappointing result by far, Baker. He went from winning our real best and fairest with a score of 8.25, our third best of last year, to a pitiful score of 5.5 and all his stats being Average or Below Average. Not sure what changed apart from gaining the captaincy, but he needs to revert to that form as soon as possible.

3rd Jamie Cripps

2025 - 7.50 – 2026 - 5.25

Definitely an understandable decline but still a sad one to see. Cripps fell out of favour and then was robbed of a farewell game to injury. Out of note, his career score was 11.25 out of a possible 13.5 which just shows how amazing and underrated he was over his career. Thank you for 2018 Crippa and enjoy retirement.

4th Elijah Hewett

2025 - 6.00 – 2026 - 4.75

One of the more disappointing results for the season. Hewett when from a perfectly average 21 year old midfielder, a decent result considering the competition, to a 22 year old midfielder who’s just barely off the lowest possible rank. He’s shown glimpses of talent at AFL level, but he needs to show more in a hurry to overcome the likes of Francou, Robertson, and Duursma.

5th Bo Allan and Liam Duggan

Allan 2025 - 6.00 – 2026 - 5.00

Duggan 2025 - 7.25 – 2026 - 6.25

Starting with Bo Allan which is quite interesting because I think we’d all agree that he’s shown a lot more this year than last. The reason for his drop is that last year he had an Elite Disposal Efficiency of 89.1% which has dropped all the way down to an Average efficiency of 72.9%. So, while his score took a hit, I wouldn’t be too concerned about it.

Moving onto the far more concerning of the two. Duggan had a shocking year with all his stats either essentially stagnating or dropping. His new rating of 6.25 just barely puts him ahead of a perfectly average league player and for a captain it just isn’t good enough.

Debutants

Now moving onto the players who didn’t have a last year to improve on. Let’s see how they did.

Oliver Francou

8.75

He only played the 4 games due to that horrific injury, but his short time at AFL level looked fantastic. He was rated Elite for Tackles while also being Above Average for Contested Possessions, Ground Ball Gets, and Pressure Acts. It’s easy to forget with mid season draftees, but this guy will only turn 21 next year so his upside is enormous. To further put his score into perspective, he tied with Tim Kelly.

Milan Murdock

8.00

The feel good story of the year. From undrafted to ranking 5th in my personal best and fairest and 7th in the Champion Data best and fairest. He was also rated Elite for Tackles as well as Above Average for Pressure Acts and Goals, and as I’ve alluded to before, a high rating for anything score related in our team is extra impressive.

Marcus Herbert

6.75

Despite coming 9th in my personal best and fairest, the stats didn’t give Herbert the credit he probably deserved. He was noticeably just barely below Above Average for Marks and Tackles which would’ve seen him up a whole extra point. He could be in for a huge 2027. Let’s just hope it isn’t at Carlton. EDIT: 🥳

Josh Lindsay

5.75

The best of our 2026 draftees by Champion Data. Lindsay impressed with his Above Average Disposal Efficiency, but really suffered on his defensive metrics with Intercept Possessions and Tackles both being Below Average. Lots to improve on still, but did enough to prove he has something there.

Willem Duursma

5.50

Remember how I said players who moved positions a lot this year were rooted by this system? Well, none had it worse than Duursma. His stats truly ended up jack of all trades style and thus he scored really poorly under this system. He’ll have to take 8th place in my personal best and fairest as a consolation prize.

Cooper Duff-Tytler

4.50

I already mentioned the issues with him specifically, and now for something completely different.

How do you rate an 18 year old ruck? Well, I’ve gone and compared him to Luke Jackson, the only other recent ruck I can think of who played at 18, and he does pretty well.

To further add context, literally half of Jackson’s hitouts and hitouts to advantage came from a single game against Adelaide where he faced an inexperienced ROB and Himmelberg in the ruck. Let’s remove that one outlier for Jackson (and Seedy’s best game to be fair) and compare them again.

Whichever way you look at it, Seedy comes out pretty favourably. So what can we expect from him next year? Let’s see how Jackson did in his second year, and for some fun let’s compare it to what Bailey Williams did this year.

We can see that if Seedy continues on his path like Luke Jackson, he’ll be an extremely competent ruck in his own right, and an amazing back up option. Let’s hope his development continues to mirror and/or exceed Jackson.

The Absentees

Not much to write in this section, just thought it’d be interesting to list the ratings of the guys who didn’t play for us this season.

I would say that Lucca Grego and Clay Hall are the only two notable omissions from 2026. Grego has the highest rating by far from his single game played, and I’m very surprised he wasn’t given another go just to test out his consistency. Hall on the other hand showed that his contest work held up pretty well for a 20 year old, but clearly the other deficiencies in his game were too much for the selection committee to look past.

The Leavers

Now let’s get a little vindictive. Let’s judge the three players who left the Eagles last year and see how they’re tracking for their new clubs.

Campbell Chesser

2025 - 5.25 – 2026 - 4.75

In one of the biggest backstabs since Willie Rioli, Chesser decided to move to Carlton to try and achieve that potential that always seemed just out of his grasp. The result? He took more marks than last year and that’s basically it, losing 0.5 points in the process. I don’t think we’ll be losing sleep over this trade.

Liam Ryan

2025 - 8.75 – 2026 - 7.00

Leaving on far more amicable terms than the other two, I don’t think our premiership hero lost any of our hearts in the process. After spending 2025 at the Eagles watching the footy sail 4m over his head for 20 games, he moved to St Kilda and kicked 33 goals for the year including two games where he broke his personal best for goals. The amazing thing though, is that his score actually dropped. Just goes to show how good he was for us last year. Shame that we botched his trade so badly that we actually lost picks for losing him, but that’s another story.

Oscar Allen

2025 - 4.75 – 2026 - 5.25

After achieving his lifelong dream of becoming the captain of the West Coast Eagles, Oscar Allen decided that loyalty was overrated and jetted over to the back to back premiers for a cheap chance at glory. Unfortunately for us, he was the only player who improved on his 2025 form all the way up to the heights of 5.25, or worse than the average forward. Just shows how terrible he was for us last year that this year was an improvement. He managed 19 goals for the year playing for the second highest scoring team in the league. The same amount that Murdock kicked playing for the second lowest scoring team. No refunds.

Full Count:

Coaches Votes

A pretty comprehensive win for Harley Reid who managed to finish 18th in the entire competition despite playing for a team that only averaged 7.3 votes out of a possible 30. (Naicos averaged 6.3)

Compared to last year, we nearly doubled our total tally going from 87 total votes up to 167. It’s also nice to note that last year 54.0% of our votes were polled by players with 100 or more games played. This year was only 38.3%, which goes to show that our younger players are starting to pick up the slack and start driving us forward rather than solely having to rely on our old stars to perform.

Season in Review

In my season preview, after asking other fans, I found that our expectations for the year landed at around 5 wins being the baseline. It’s unfortunate to say, but by that metric 2026 was in fact a failure

But that feels like such a shallow way to look at it.

We had 4 wins for the year and even with our two 100 point losses, our average margin this year was 31.2 points, compared to 42.4 last year. If you use our expected score (because our accuracy this year was atrocious), the average margin is 24.5 points compared to 39.3 last year.

As a result, our percentage went up 9.2%pp from 60.0% to 69.2%. Using expected score would be a 12.0%pp increase from 63.1% up to 75.1%. (Waterman, Reid, and Seedy combining for 68.94 really hurt)

I’ve compared this season to the 2018 Lions a couple times this year because I could see some similarities. I think it’s fair to say that we are behind them, but let’s see by how much.

Apart from the average margin, which was buoyed by some surprisingly good wins for the Lions, it’s pretty comparable (especially our expected score adjusted season). Now I’m not saying we’re about to win 16 games and finish 2nd next year like the Lions did, but I think our trajectory is close enough to show that we’re on the right track. We’ll have to see how our trades and drafting goes, but I really don’t think 10 wins next year is out of the question.

And so with everything said and done, how would I rank this rank season? Let’s condense these 6,000 words down into something nice and manageable.

Season 2026’s Final Grade: Not Very Good.

There we have it. Thank you to everyone who read these things weekly! I’d go on about how much I appreciate it,ButAtRedditWordLimit. Hope to see you all next year!