It might not be in the verge of “exploding”, but what’s also true is that we won 11 games from the hardest draw in the comp (including double-ups against both teams who played in the grand final, 3/4 of the prelim teams and 4 of the top 6!) and there won’t be anyone in our 22 who’s likely to drop off in output due to age, while there are a bunch of young/youngish guys at the club who are yet to have their “breakout year” (eg King, Clark, Higgins, Coffield, Sharman, Wanganeen-Milera, Windhager, Paton, Bytel), plus a bunch of others who Ratten failed to get the best out of consistently (eg. Hill, Jones, Billings, Butler), while Gresham, Marshall and Jones have been hit hard by injury/etc in the last two years, so it’s not exactly hard to see how we could improve, if Lyon’s able to extract the best out of more of the group than Ratten did. Which is his bread-and-butter.First time he's gone to coach a club that's not on the verge of exploding. Think he might do well but a rebuild/refresh of sorts is likely on the cards.
And then it’s hard to imagine that we’ll have a worse game-plan than we did under Ratts, so there’s significant scope for improvement there as well.
It may of course be that it will take a year for everyone to get used to the way Ross goes about things and that it will take him time to weed out those who don’t want to do the work, but if things fall into place quickly… well it was only half a season ago that we were in the top 4. And two years ago that we finished 5th.