I am going to show my age, here.
At the conclusion of last season, I was relatively happy with how our Defensive Player of the Year Award eneded up. We had a great array of defensive players of all sorts within the top ten, with a big brute and an elite outside runner ending up tied for the award. Good job, HB… a nice balanced award.
But something still stuck with me a bit, and I couldn’t get past the fact that taggers were ranked so lowly in the overall rankings. Granted, they did not play tagging roles every week, but there were times when I felt the formula let them down.
So, I opted to fix it.
Like a mad scientist, I was adding six drops of essence of terror, five drops of sinister sauce. Yes, I am stealing lines from the opening of the Milton the Monster cartoon (see, dating myself). And I was doing that to give defensive mids the credit they deserved, and a chance to be recognised more accurately as part of this award.
Three games into the season, and I have created my Milton the Monster.
We have a tagger leading the DPOY. And it would be tough to argue against the merits of it, given the way James Jordon has started 2025.
The Mongrel Punt DPOY fills a hole in the AFL landscape.
With so much attention lavished on the midfielders and forwards, I found that outside of the All-Australian team, there was no real recognition for the best defenders in the game. It was the same for wingmen, and we now cover those players in our Robbie Flower Wingman of the Year Award.
The Defensive Player of the Year does not have the name of a great player attached to it (yet) but what it does have is six years of data analysing the best defenders in the game, ranking them on a weekly basis, and compiling that data into a leaderboard for each season.
We started this in 2020, with Fremantle’s interceptor/defender making the most of the shortened season to win the inaugural award. This accompanied his initial All-Australian selection, however, since then only none of our DPOY selections have worn the blazer – how they missed out is genuinely concerning when you look at who did make it in those seasons.
Previous winners listed below.
2020 – LUKE RYAN
2021 – JACOB WEITERING
2022 – JAMES SICILY
2023 – HARRIS ANDREWS
2024 – SAM COLLINS/LACHIE WHITFIELD (TIED)
How does it work?
Each week, defenders are ranked in a range of categories pertinent to their roles as defenders. These include disposals combined with efficiency, one-percenters, intercepts, rebound 50s, metres gained, tackles, as well as votes from a range of sources.
There is particular focus on the purest of the defensive art – the spoils, and players who excel in that area tend to score consistently throughout the season, as evidenced by Andrews, Weitering, and Collins winning the award.
That said, the man who shared the award with Collins in 2024, Lachie Whitfield, proved that there is definitely scope for a running, rebounding defender to take the award home, too. We are as close to an equal-opportunity DPOY award as you’ll find.
Yep, that’s it for non Inner-Circle members. Sorry people – see below.
Now, I know some of you will ask – I am a member; why can’t I see this? This is for the Inner Circle Member tier – always has been. This is what these people generously pay a bit extra for, so I am more than happy to dive deep for them when it comes to this content. If you’re a Mongrel Member and you’d like to upgrade, go right ahead. If not, that’s cool, as well. But this is not a new thing – has been that way for over three years now. Wanna join them?
