Best, not fairest: Why the Heeney ban exposes an outdated Brownlow

Isaac Heeney took what was arguably the best mark of 2024, but can’t get the official gong – and $50,000 and two million frequent flier points – for mark of the year.

Heeney, in this column’s view, has also been the most influential or impactful player in the competition this year, but is ineligible to win the game’s “highest individual honour,” the Brownlow Medal.

Isaac Heeney at training in Sydney on Sunday ahead of the grand final.Credit: Getty Images

There is clear, unequivocal logic behind Heeney’s ineligibility for the mark of the year – he took that horizontal hanger in the finals series, not in a home and away game. Players from 10 non-finalist teams did not have the opportunity to leap for the stars.

His ineligibility for the Brownlow is based on 100 years of tradition. Many, if not most, followers of the game would say that the “fairest and best” component – and the quirk of the umpires awarding votes – should be preserved, protected and defended, as if it was the precious constitution of the United States.

Why?

The overriding reason that players in Heeney’s position can’t win the Brownlow – and so spend the night with an asterisk affixed to their name – is that the Brownlow’s framers made “fairest” one of the indispensable criteria.

Yet when one considers the roll call of players who’ve won Brownlows, “fairest” was not close to an accurate description of a number of those champions.

Isaac Heeney was suspended for this incident with St Kilda’s Jimmy Webster.Credit: Channel Seven

No one who witnessed Tony Lockett, Greg Williams or Robert DiPierdomenico in their brutal primes would ever confer that superlative on them. Yet, they won the medal – Williams twice, sharing it once with the improbable Dipper in 1986 (“I only came for the free feed” Dipper said, truthfully).

“Fairest” really meant that you had avoided suspension. Theoretically, the umpires might be more inclined to award votes to the “fair” player - one who seldom, if ever, deploys questionable violence on field - rather than the less scrupulous player. But that wasn’t necessarily true.

Heeney’s case is one that should invite a review of the Brownlow Medal’s rules and to consider whether the prohibition on suspended players should continue.

I would argue that, considering the revolutionary and welcome changes in how the game is policed on the field, it is faintly absurd to deprive a player of the medal for a one-match ban for a negligent tackle or something similar.

AFL players of today are handed suspensions for acts that often wouldn’t have drawn a free kick in decades past.

Heeney’s was hardly heinous. His suspension came from throwing a stray arm back – seemingly to break free – and thus collecting St Kilda’s Jimmy Webster high, as he went on to take a mark unopposed.

The tribunal case and appeal were much-discussed, with the public and punditry split on whether Heeney deserved a week off or not (it was definitely a free).

But the fact that this was debatably reportable – a split-second incident on the edge of acceptable aggression, much like some over-vigorous tackles – underscored the problem that contemporary officiating and “clean” rules have created for the Brownlow.

Players of recent years are being rubbed out, often for a week, for collisions that exist in the twilight zone between accident and “negligence.”

When the Brownlow’s no-suspension edict was framed, it was evidently to rule out players who had engaged, even just once, in much more serious acts of violence – punches, elbows, forearms. In days of yore, footballers could be wiped out in what was deemed “a fair bump” and the umpire would call play on.

Thankfully, the sanitising of the game has eradicated most of the thuggery, and the AFL – ever conscious of concussion and the grassroots ecosystem – has cracked down on incidents that do not involve conscious attempts to cause harm. High bumps are particularly dangerous and must bring suspensions if, as the league decreed, the player chooses to bump.

When Chris Grant (Bulldogs) lost his Brownlow in 1997, it was for a round-arm that definitely warranted two weeks; where he was stiff was that it was the AFL’s then football boss, Ian Collins, who intervened to see him charged.

Corey McKernan of North Melbourne had been unlucky in 1996, when he tied with James Hird and Michael Voss, spending the night at home after a one-match ban for jumping on Geelong’s John Barnes.

These suspensions were for incidents more serious than Heeney’s. It will be fascinating to see how Heeney polls up to that point in round 17, and then subsequently. Therein lies another problem – could a player’s ineligibility skew future votes?

Heeney isn’t an unfair player. Patrick Cripps isn’t an unfair player, yet – on a comparative basis – is fortunate to have retained his Brownlow given his collision with Callum Ah Chee in 2022.

If the rules are not amended – and either one-game bans no longer disqualifying, or the prohibition on suspensions removed altogether – then we will be seeing more players unfairly removed from the Brownlow starting gate.

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