Twists and turns: What impact is varying AFL fixture having on performance?

Unfortunately, in doing so, I made a mistake.

Not a huge one, I hasten to add. Just the presumption that sooner than later, things would settle down and that some form of normal transmission would be resumed. It's now clear that isn't going to be happening.

The very format of this season has made "normal transmission" redundant.

Indeed, it's getting harder to remember what "normal" actually is in terms of scheduling.

In the first seven weekends of AFL action this season, just twice was a full round of nine games played.

And the second of those saw all teams rostered in Adelaide, hardly your typical scenario.

It took until Round 6 for all 18 teams to have played the same amount of games.

But by then it was also time for "Anzac Round", with games scheduled across five days between Wednesday and Sunday.

And there's at least four days of AFL matches out of seven the next two weeks after this, Thursday night fixtures concluding in Round 13.

That is the weekend of the King's Birthday holiday, meaning there will be at least one AFL game played for five consecutive days.

But on three of those days there'll be just one game played, because two teams will have a bye.

Indeed, there's four more rounds containing a bye, starting this week, when Brisbane, Sydney, North Melbourne and GWS have a week off.

In Round 13, it's Fremantle and Port Adelaide having a spell, then six teams in each of the following two rounds.

Which means that Round 16 will actually be the first round of the season in which what had for more than decade been the traditional weekend structure of one Friday night game, five on Saturday and three on Sunday, will have been followed.

I'm not arguing that's necessarily a bad thing.

Thursday night football - at least from a TV viewing perspective - has grown on me.

But all the fixture tweaking and tinkering certainly creates a different and still highly unpredictable new playing field.

Take, for example, the greater instances of five-day breaks for teams which go hand-in-hand with more Thursday night games.

Even last year, the five-day break was something clubs were dreading, but there's been 13 teams so far this season who've played on a short five-day break against sides who've had at least six days' preparation, and the results are a more encouraging six wins, six losses and a draw.

With Thursday night football likely to go all season from next year rather than just until Round 13 like now, getting a handle on coping with short preparation times is critical.

Maybe, however, there's a price to pay when teams come off longer breaks, and it's unevenness of routine rather than intensity which is costly in terms of performance?

In this new fixture environment, we can't yet really know.

Ditto with bye rounds, of which we now have a month, just seven games on this week, then eight and six and six.

Yes, we've had them for a while now, in all sorts of configurations, with differing results.

There's often concern for teams coming off a bye against a team which has played on, certainly justified if last year's results are anything to go by.

In 2023, there were 14 such games. The "rested" team won just four of them, while the team which had continued playing won 10.

This season, meanwhile, if you consider the 10 teams who didn't play in "Opening Round" as having had a bye, the scoreline in such clashes thus far is 4-4.

Are teams getting better at knowing how to come up after a week off?

Or will the scoreline change more because this is the second bye teams will have had in approximately half a season?

Or will it be the teams whose two breaks are most evenly spread who will benefit the most?

In that case, you'd think Sydney and Melbourne particularly would be all smiles at the moment, and not just because they're sitting in top and fourth spot respectively on the AFL ladder.

Both the Swans and Demons were part of "Opening Round".

Because of that, Sydney played five games to start their season then had a week off, and will have played another six by the time the Swans' Round 12 bye rolls around.

In Melbourne's case, the Demons played six games to start 2024, rested in Round 6, and are set to play another seven before their Round 15 bye.

Sydney in particular, has sizzled all season, while Melbourne, despite losing four games, has only had one genuine "stinker" among those losses.

Perhaps the Demons, having snapped a two-game losing streak with an efficient dispatching of St Kilda last Sunday, might have preferred to keep going were they to get on a roll, though given the injury toll this season, that is open to debate.

But Sydney didn't get over the line by much against the Western Bulldogs last Thursday, its seventh victory on the trot.

Maybe this week's break for the Swans has come at the perfect time, a little physical and mental refresh doing the same job that is instead usually done by the instant reality check of defeat, this time without match points being sacrificed.

That, though, is all supposition.

And in 2024, a fixture which has all sorts of twists and turns is still novel enough to have even the coaches guessing about the impact as much as the rest of us.