The same could be said of Voss at Brisbane.
And I'm not 100% sold on this "great breeding ground" stuff. Coaches either have a natural aptitude to be a senior coach or they don't. How many of Thompson's Geelong assistants have gone on to big things? Is Leon Cameron setting the world on fire with arguably the most talented list the game has seen? This is why I'm not rushing out and jumping on the Dew bandwagon. He's been an assistant a long time. Does that mean he'll make the progression to gun senior coach a mere formality? Who knows?
What we do know is that Bassett, like Clarkson before him, has served a long apprenticeship in varying roles including success as a senior coach in his own right.
I'm just not sure I'd be jumping on all these guys. Ratten, like Voss, didn't set the world on fire as a senior AFL coach first time around. Maybe he's just destined to be a career assistant. Maybe Dew is too.