2025 Draft Watch

[GVGjr]

Even more surprising when we already have Croft and Smith as long term tall projects, and Will Darcy coming in as another long term tall project. How many talls who aren't ready for AFL can a finals contender carry on their list?

We might be looking at this along the lines of we have already put two years of development into Croft and Smith and 3 years into Busslinger and we need to continue to invest in the long term development of taller player.
It does seem out of whack that out of 3 picks this year two of them are on taller players.
Could it be explained that we don't have a lot of confidence in Smith as a ruck man at the senior level?

[Virgin-Dog]

Even more surprising when we already have Croft and Smith as long term tall projects, and Will Darcy coming in as another long term tall project. How many talls who aren't ready for AFL can a finals contender carry on their list?

In 2024, Geelong had Mitchell Edwards (20yrs - 0 games), Toby Conway (22yrs - 6 games), Joe Pike (20yrs, 0 games) and Jacob Molier (19yrs - 0 games). I think provided you have your core spine to begin with, plus some degree of depth so they're not being thrown in the deep end, it's fine for us to have 4 project talls.

In Geelong's case, they're basically all rucks as their primary role which is a little strange, but in our case we'd have a KPF (Croft), Ruck (Smith), KPD (Darcy), KPD/Interceptor (Walker) plus any additional talls drafted. I much prefer the spread of roles in our case. Though I'm not keen on drafting another tall this year; we need runners