Would you like me to use a more dramatic adjective to appease you?
Once again, you’re dramatising Collingwood’s situation. Up until last year, they were playing finals, coming off a a GF and a Prelim, so I’d hardly classify it as a broken football club. I personally wouldn’t be comparing Collingwood to Adelaide and North. At the very least, Collingwood was competitive on field for majority of the season, unlike those two clubs at their worst.
Were you predicting Adelaide to finish above or below Essendon last season? They’ve leapfrogged Adelaide, and that’s putting it kindly.
And lastly, of course it’s easy to predict when clubs go into rebuild mode. Everyone automatically assumes they’ll be cellardwellars for the next 5 seasons. That’s pretty lazy IMO, thus the thread.
It is lazy to assume next 5 years and obviously there's always teams that break the rules (i.e. Dogs 2016) but looking at this side you posted
FB: Ruscoe, Moore, Noble
HB: Quaynor, Maynard, Crisp
C: J Daicos, N Daicos, Poulter
HF: Bianco, Kelly, Henry
FF: McCreery, JDG, Ginnivan
R: Grundy, Adams, Macrae
INT: Lynch, Wilson, Brown, Murphy
All of Ruscoe, N.Daicos, Poulter, Bianco, Kelly, Henry, McCreery, Ginnivan, Macrae, Lynch, Wilson, Brown, Murphy will have played sub 50 games by the end of 2023 (some a chance to reach it if they play every game). No matter how promising the kids are, this would be an all time out-of-order finals team. Ron The Bear would probably be able to provide some analysis on where a team like that fits.
Teams with 13 sub 50 game best 22 players don't make finals. Essendon scraped in with 8ish and that included more mature age players such as Waterman (24), Draper (22), Snelling (23 to 24), Hind (26), Ridley (22), Redman (23 to 24), majority of which would be older than the Pies group.
Even allowing for Roughead, Cameron, Elliott & Mihocek to hang around for that season wouldn't be enough.
Add in too short down back, too short up forward, it's a bottom 6 age and list development demographic. As for McCrae, he might be good, he might be bad, but I don't know of a new coach that HASN'T come in with hype about being rated in the industry etc - it's why they get the job??
Further, most clubs could throw in names like Ginnivan, McCreery, Ruscoe, Wilson, Lynch etc - mid/late/rookie draft selections with a handful of games to their name for exposure, without any guarantee of making it. Again, look at history, there's no way just on numbers they are all making it in such a way they push for finals as a bunch of 20 year olds.
Richmond of 2009-2012 built a successful dynasty and looking at their list of 2011 does not show great stats for how clubs build lists in terms of strike rate - more miss than hit.