The Great Ruck Debate.

[LP]

If that really made no difference you wouldn’t see the guns on the pine.

I think your statement is a confusion of total time on the bench versus +/- some seconds, and that is how intuition fails most fans.

The average total game time if we consider the length of quarters is about 120min, the average percentage time on ground if we are conservative is about 70%. So that's on average about 84min on the ground and 36min off the ground. We concede across the list the distribution is a bell curve, with KPPs closer to 100% and SFs closer to 60%, Subs are typically < 30%.

Further in that 120min, there are 20 to 30 total goals scored, in modern AFL that's 10min to 15min of global rest time minimum, in real terms actually it's even more because of the broadcast arrangements.

The players I heard discuss the impact of two rucks basically imply that 26min of bench time +/- some seconds makes stuff all difference.

How many visits to the bench do players have, and over how many visits to the bench is that "lost" 60s to 90s per player distributed across? 4 at one visit per quarter, 8 if they go to the bench twice, that's somewhere between 7s and 15s per visit!

If I look at a top line running Mid, someone like Warner or Heeney for the Swans last night, they spend 85% game time on the ground, they come off once per quarter for an average of 255s, so the second ruck would give them 255s +/- 15s in the worst case.

I tend to believe the players.