The SuperCoach ‘ghost’ team that would have finished in top 100 without a single trade

WHAT if you could pick a SuperCoach team before Round 1, not make a single trade or change for the entire season and finish in the top 100 overall? Believe it or not, it was possible in 2018. SEE THE SQUAD

Max Gawn of the Melbourne Demons.

THERE’S at least one in every league. A SuperCoach team completely abandoned by its coach.

One that idles through the season being obliterated by everyone else in the competition. While the rest of us diligently read articles, listen to podcasts, and invest quality time at work discussing trade strategies, these “ghost” teams pose a constant and unwanted reminder that for some sad individuals, SuperCoach is not the be-all and end-all of life.

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It’s a terrifying thought, but could one of these ghost teams take home the $50,000 overall prize?

In what could only be considered the SuperCoach equivalent to remembering that back in 2008 your mate convinced you to invest in bitcoin, could a team that was set up at the start of the season and then forgotten about win it all?

Zero trades used, same captain, same vice-captain, same starting positions, same emergencies, and same ignorant coach not knowing the true thrill of coaching an imaginary team of players online.

Thankfully, the answer is no. In 2018, it was not possible. But with a total score of 52,935, which would earn you 77th position in a competition with almost 200,000 teams, the best possible ghost team does get hauntingly close.

Talk about a win for humanity. To those 76 teams who outscored the ghost, the community thanks you.

See below the optimal SuperCoach ghost team for 2018.

This team could have finished 77th overall without a single trade.

The idea that you could set this team up back in mid-March, never touch it again and come 77th is both a testament to lazy coaches and borderline offensive.

Granted, there are an alarming number of mid-priced players. In fact, there are a total of 12 players in the team with a starting value between $200,000 and $500,000. It is generally an accepted rule of thumb in SuperCoach that players in this bracket tend to be risky picks at the start of the season as it is hard to know which players will step up to become premiums in any given year.

Well and truly falling in the risky business bracket at the start of season 2018 were: Jack Crisp, Jayden Short, Lachie Hunter, Josh Dunkley and arguably Luke Breust.

Getting the bench players right was also a key to the ghost team’s success. They are not shown here but there are a number of occasions when an emergency will have a high score just when required. For example, Jaeger O’Meara did not play in Round 9, which allowed Nick Holman’s 122 points from the bench to count as emergency. Very smooth.

Max Gawn didn’t miss a game this year.

Just as in the Optimal SuperCoach team this year we see Max Gawn, Brodie Grundy and a rookie make up the rucks. The benefit of having such reliable stock in the rucks is that one of the four emergency positions is not required for this position.

Two emergency players in the forward line is potentially reckless considering that if only one emergency is required, then the lower point scorer of the two counts. But for this team, it’s a strategy that pays off. In Round 5, Tom Hawkins and Bayley Frisch both do not play, which means both Jack Henry’s 48 and Jack Higgins’ 91 are counted. Likewise in Round 10 with Justin Westhoff and Josh Dunkley not playing, Higgins’ 51 and Henry’s 99 are both counted. Very satisfying to see.

Grundy being made captain makes sense. He did after all finish as the highest pointscorer in the game. Elliot Yeo as vice-captain is a little surprising given he finished as the 10th highest-point scorer for the season. The reason for this is that during Grundy’s bye in Round 13, which was the only game he missed for the season, Yeo scored a team-high 144 points.

As with the Optimal SuperCoach Team article, I used Mixed-Integer Programming to run this analysis. It is almost like this entire field of mathematics was accidentally designed to answer hypothetical questions for fantasy football in hindsight.

So for those of you who made a beautiful team at the start of the year and proceeded to neglect it all its life, there is still hope you won’t be a terrible coach forever. After all, 77th is not bad for kicking your heels up all year.

Steven Edwards is a PhD Candidate in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University and works on large-scale optimisation problems

Originally published as The SuperCoach ‘ghost’ team that would have finished in top 100 without a single trade