Would you continue your support of the club if we bottomed out for 3 years?

What level of support would you offer the club if we went down the development path for 3 years?

  • I'd continue my financial support of the club through my membership

    Votes: 105 85.4%
  • I'd stop supporting the club financially but would remain a fan

    Votes: 9 7.3%
  • I'd stop following the club entirely

    Votes: 4 3.3%
  • I'd begin financially supporting the club by becoming a member

    Votes: 5 4.1%

  • Total voters
    123
  • Poll closed .

Remove this Banner Ad

I am currently in Europe with the family and having a terrible holiday. I have not been able to watch our games live. Seeing them getting beaten like they have been is heartbreaking but the first week l get back l will be going to our game against Carlton. Sure we may lose but my family and I will always follow this club through thick and thin because this is the club we elected to follow and l would feel like l have betrayed them if l changed. I am and always will be North Melbourne.
 

Log in to remove this ad.

May 20, 2011
11,933
10,521
AFL Club
North Melbourne
Not only do we need to bottom out for 2 or 3 years but we need a clean out of line coaches and admin staff starting with Brad Scott.

We won't progress much by doing the former and not the latter, we need a full scale club make over from top to bottom.
 

Shagga is all Class

Premiership Player
May 15, 2005
4,136
6,220
Beneath the Blue and White
AFL Club
North Melbourne
Other Teams
NMFC
Only if we clean out the boys club now starting with Scott.

No game plan, cannot develop players, too many favourites, no accountability and most of all no Shinboner Spirit.

With Scott & Co. we will sign Goldy for another 5 years and hold onto any player with trade value.
 

MFV94

Debutant
Jul 22, 2015
78
121
North Melbourne
AFL Club
North Melbourne
If we go with a new coach who's direction is developing players and creating a winning culture in years to come, knowing we have a future to look at, I will back them in 100%.
I will not support if we continue with Brad Scott. Time and time again I'm personally sick of all his excuses over the 10 years. Id continue to buy a membership but wouldn't go to games until he is gone.
 

dus

Premiership Player
May 14, 2002
4,907
9,627
Poker Table
AFL Club
North Melbourne
Other Teams
Kangaroos
We sit bottom of the ladder. I’m pretty sure we are currently, bottoming out.

Problem is it’s not intentional.

Question is, who is going to rebuild us?
 

benbanjo

Norm Smith Medallist
Aug 16, 2009
9,359
10,977
AFL Club
North Melbourne
Currently, it won’t make a difference what type of players we bring into the club.

I don’t think we would win the flag even if we had Kelly and Dusty playing for us.

If we cant bring a flexible game plan to the table none of it will matter.

The draft is still hit and miss, you really need to get plenty of picks in the top 10 to be sure you land a great players, it's been hard to get anywhere in the draft with the expansion teams like GWS taking all the talent.

however

Luke Mcdonald went before Cripps.

JZ went before Sidebottom

Taylor Garner went before Brodie Grundy.(injuries yes i know)

Simpkin ahead of Powell Pepper(time will tell)

We got Cunnington at pick 5, very good player, only one player ahead of him is better( Dusty) and the best player went at pick 21, we had pick 22.


Many top level picks turn out to be a bust or nothing special.

Injuries aside.

Patton pick 1

Boyd pick 1( Had a good GF I’ll give him that)

Watts pick 1

Schache pick 2

MCcartin pick 1(time will tell)

Petracca pick 2 (time will tell)

O'Rourke pick 2

Trengove pick 2

Morabbitto Pick 4

Benell Pick 2

Butcher pick 8

Rohan Pick 6

Moore Pick 9

Toumpas Pick 4

Billings Pick 3(better this year)


All of the above have not gone on to be stars for one reason or another, so there are no guarantees.

The above are players that only come to mind, I’m sure there are many others, which i cant recall currently.


We currently have the below, and maybe other high picks i can’t think of atm.

Tyson pick 3

Polec Pick 5

Cunnington Pick 5

Lmac Pick 8 (would have gone higher)

LDU Pick 4

Ahern Pick 7

So in saying that, 3 years of bottoming out most likely won’t do the trick unless we trade away more players to try and move up to get 2-3 top 10 picks over each of those 3 years at a minimum.

We need a team of coaches who can actually coach, Pagan could Coach, Laidley could coach, Brad Scott cannot coach, he is good at other things though.

OUr list is not that bad IMO, however our best players are around the 30 mark age wise.

Need to bring in a new team of coaches, shake things up.

Keeping things as they currently are won’t do s**t for us moving forward.
 
Last edited:
Love the club just dont like who is running it.

I will continue to boycott attending games until the coach is gone.
 

(Log in to remove this ad.)

Those older generations didn't have top facilities, equal access to talent etc.

On SM-G950F using BigFooty.com mobile app
Totally irrelevant, and to use it as an excuse is pathetic. Every club has top facilities and equal access to talent, yet not every club can be successful all the time. You don't give up on your club just because they have a few years of difficulty. It's pathetic.
 
We got Cunnington at pick 5, very good player, only one player ahead of him is better( Dusty)
Morabbitto Pick 4
Dusty
Morabito
Cunnington

We were never in the race for Dusty.

Freo ranked Moribito higher than Fyfe.

Dissecting a draft in hindsight is difficult because it's being done post development and does not fully consider junior performance.
 
Nov 14, 2012
2,272
8,467
AFL Club
Gold Coast
Other Teams
Doutta "Porn" Stars
Take it from me, bottoming out does not equate to future success. It is an idiotic motion. Fans lose interest. Free agents aren't interested in coming. Chicks don't wanna know ya. There's nothing worse than going to a night-club wearing your club jumper and they're in the bottom 4. It sucks. With the Suns being in the top 8 recently however, I've been "very busy" in the bathroom, but the last few years have been drought-like, bordering on Old-Nino.
Carlton and Melbourne aren't exactly looking like premiership threats and they bottomed out for a decade!!!!! I feel for their male fans.

I've been Mr Scott's second biggest fan for a decade now, but the messages coming from his own mouth are erotic at best. One minute things are an easy fix, the next minute there's a fingernail in it!!!

It reminds me of when my Uncle Arthur passed away a few times. God bless his sole. He was a veterinarian who fought in the Golf War but returned home and couldn't shake off a nasty cough. His GP kept telling him, "I know what's wrong. It's an easy fix. Just suck on Fishermans Friends and chew Extra Chewing Gum. You'll come good." After going down-hill fast over a 10 year period, we finally sought a second opinion. Diagnosis - Pulomonary Ammonia - probably due to all the Mustang Gas he had been exposed to. I'd like to say he fought the good fight.
 
Last edited:

R00StaR

Norm Smith Medallist
Apr 3, 2003
7,039
6,538
Asgard
AFL Club
North Melbourne
Other Teams
Kangaroos
Agree with others, even top 5 picks are hit and miss. Look how long it took GWS to come good with the crazy number of picks they had. While 3 x top 5 and say 3 x top 20-23 would be nice, by the time they started hitting their straps we'd need to replace a bunch of quality players in their late 20s+. To totally rebuild a list in the draft is probably closer to 10 years.

Our current method is probably best, take picks to the draft unless theres a big fish we really want and look to FAs and player trades. If we happen to finish low we get a top 1-3 pick anyway and should have plenty of ammo for a big fish FA.
 
There are people here who think that this list is good enough to play finals and be a top 4 H&A team and that for the first time Scotts has his own team/list and finally no excuses/reasons things didn't work out.

So... I think bottoming out pointless if we don't make the most of what we've got.

Frankly I reckon I could coach this side to finals and I suspect there are more than a few people here who might be able to do the same.

83 to 84 was hard. 87 to 93 was devestating... in fact 83 - 93 was a trying decade. Not cos we were always s**t, just cos we were more MoR than now, had some shocking years near the bottom of the ladder and some terrible finals performances. It felt like the late 70s were a dream that'd never be repeated. I was in high school at the time so that probably made it worse.

Now 3 years is a bit like 3 months back then. It'd be heaps easier to cope with.

But it'd be a waste.

This list is better than its been for years and finally has the elements to make a reasonably balanced side. A bit more pace in the middle would be nice but we could always use Hall.

Bottoming out now is a baby with bathwater situation.
 
There are people here who think that this list is good enough to play finals and be a top 4 H&A team and that for the first time Scotts has his own team/list and finally no excuses/reasons things didn't work out.


And having said all that ...

This year I've heard something I've never heard footy players say before. "There's more to life than footy."

The only reason i can think of that happening is the response to Maj's crisis.

Its the only thing that could possibly generate that mentality in a footy side. As far as I can see anyway.

So if our s**t performance is in part due to the fallout from what Maj did and how its hit the players then Scotts actually does deserve some slack for it.

But unfortunately for him he has run out of time. If he can't get clear air now he never will.

There will always be something and at some point you've just got to push on thru.
 
The issue isn't "would BF diehards continue to support the Club" but "would relatively new members continue".
If we go through 2019 without any very significant change then I can see us dropping 5k members in 2020.

The thing that really concerns me over recent weeks is the lack of comment coming from the Club. Where is the leadership?
 
We've finished mid table for 20 years. We're not going anywhere in terms of success, and the club seems fairly stable off the field.

The club has always seen bottoming out as untenable considering the potential for supporters to drop off. But it's had us on the treadmill for 2 decades. Sydney, Geelong and Hawthorn have been the same, but they've had structural advnatges and success that has allowed them to bring in elite talent.

For every example of Melbourne and Gold Coast, there are far more examples where bringing in top end talent has worked. Just the last few premiers. Gaff, Kennedy (via Judd), Nat, Shuey. Martin, Riewoldt, Cotchin. Botempelli, Stringer, Boyd (via Griffin). Roughead, Lewis, Hodge. Im forgetting lots. These top end talents are the guts of premiership teams, and we really haven't got any (maybe Cunnington aside, I don't think Higgins is that).

We may not have a choice. This list may be bottom 3 bad anyway. But it may require us trading a good player or many for 1st rounders (Tarrant, Higgins).

I hate the idea of not competing for a flag every year, but free agency, trading and picking the eyes out of 2nd and 3rd round picks haven't worked. Hitting the top of the draft is the one thing we haven't tried. This isn't to suggest it will work, but it offers the clearest route back to contention for us.

If we re-orient the football department and coaches to develoment of young players, what level of support would you offer the club if they went down the patch of moving veterans on for picks and priortise development over wins?

**I'll assume most of us buy memberships. It's not a pubic poll.

This whole 'bottoming out' is kind of bullshit imo.

Last year we beat the Hawks with pressure, ran Richmond close with pressure, our turnovers ultimately being the difference, we made GWS look ordinary, we made the premiers look ordinary. We beat more decent teams than Collingwood did last year but they played with far more consistency and put the sword to almost every mediocre side, including us. We are mediocre because we can't bring our A game every week and the variance is far too great between our better and worse games.

Our development seems flawed, we don't seem to build the foundations of solid basic skills so we sell ourselves into unnecessary trouble and we seem to be making fundamentally basic errors in the way we play the game and the minimum standard we set and from the outside looking in our coaching staff aren't doing enough to getting the minimum standard high enough that we can be consistent.

Despite our ability to beat good teams last year, I had zero expectation or faith that it was actually going to happen the weeks that it did, and quite often when I did have the expectation against lesser teams we too frequently failed to play to an acceptable minimum standard.

We have plenty of evidence if players make the right call and play with conviction it has a significant on-field impact, the frustrating thing for the board is they look at what we are capable of and trying to figure out how to fix the flaws without ******* up that potential to play to those highs that we did.

We have always lacked class since the 90s era, we seem to be getting access to more quality with LDU, Ahern, Scott and Thomas but that isn't going to help this year.

What we need is to be smart as a club as to be able to make the right calls, like when we are a realistic chance to contend and when we are not. Our talent is spread too thin over a wide age band, we don't have enough in any one age cluster that has the basis to contend around. If we bottom our for 3 years and get 3 good first round picks, they will likely end up replacing Higgins, Tarrant, Thompson who are near the end and after that period Cunnington, Ziebell, etc will be near the end. We can't just continue to tread water. We need to get a bigger cluster of talent in a similar age group.

If we were to contend in the present, we needed significantly more output from our 100+ game players. Outside of the dinosaurs we have Ziebell 193 games, Cunnington 192, Atley 181, Macmillan 144, Wright 133, Tarrant 131, Williams 105, Brown 104, McDonald 100. Most of our leaders are in this group, but they don't really lead the team on-field. They sometimes play well, other times not so well, but they really aren't the foundations to build a premiership campaign over 5 years on and I question the judgement of the club trying to load up.

The "war chest" in recent years wasn't so much about why we couldn't lure better quality players to the club, it is why aren't we developing the better quality talent into deserving more of our salary cap.

We need to address the standard of footballers we are developing otherwise it is all irrelevant bullshit, nothing is going to change unless that happens. We really don't have many people in that group listed that would be a priority for any club to recruit, that is an indictment on our football club and their ability to develop players.

We just need to sort this s**t out. We have sucked for two decades outside of brief reprieves, we do not need another guaranteed period of sucking for no promise that suffering through it will be worth it.
 

benbanjo

Norm Smith Medallist
Aug 16, 2009
9,359
10,977
AFL Club
North Melbourne
Dusty
Morabito
Cunnington

We were never in the race for Dusty.

Freo ranked Moribito higher than Fyfe.

Dissecting a draft in hindsight is difficult because it's being done post development and does not fully consider junior performance.
Never said we were in the hunt for Dusty, what i said was that only one player taken before Cunnington turned out better than him.

The point is not dissecting, its showing that a large number of early picks don’t become good player, let alone stars.
 
Back