Scott’s Fixture Grievances Won’t Save Geelong’s Season

Chris Scott has never been shy about articulating his frustrations with the competition’s administrative architecture, and this week he returned to familiar territory, revisiting his grievances about Geelong’s fixture loading while simultaneously insisting the Cats retain the capacity to challenge for September honours. Both positions are entirely defensible in isolation. Together, however, they create a tension that demands some honest scrutiny.

Let me be clear about where I stand before we go further: I follow the Adelaide Crows, a club that has had its own complicated relationship with fixture equity debates over the years, so I am not entirely without sympathy for clubs who feel the scheduling gods have not smiled upon them. But sympathy and agreement are different animals, and on this occasion I think Scott’s public campaign — well-articulated as it always is — risks becoming a distraction from the more immediate football problems Geelong needs to solve.

What Scott Is Actually Arguing

To be fair to the Cats coach, his complaint is not simply that Geelong has had a tough draw. That would be too blunt an instrument for a man of Scott’s rhetorical precision. His argument is more structural: that the fixture, as presently constructed, does not provide sufficient consistency in scheduling conditions to allow clubs to accurately gauge where they sit in the competition hierarchy. Rest days, travel burdens, the sequencing of opponents — he has been making variations of this case for several seasons now.

And the case is not entirely without foundation. The AFL fixture is an extraordinarily complex document to produce, balancing broadcast windows, ground availability, club revenue requirements, interstate travel logistics and a dozen other competing interests. The Commission and its scheduling team deserve credit for managing that complexity. But complexity is not the same as equity, and any honest observer would concede that some clubs carry heavier logistical loads than others across the course of a season.

Where the Argument Starts to Fray

The difficulty with Scott’s position — and this is where I must respectfully depart from his framing — is that every club navigates the fixture with some degree of genuine grievance. Collingwood plays too many Thursday night games, Adelaide and Port Adelaide fly enormous distances for road trips that would ground a lesser travel manager, Brisbane manage a unique set of scheduling pressures as the only club based in Queensland. The AFL, for all its faults, does attempt to rotate the burden around.

\p>Geelong are not unique in feeling the pinch. What makes Scott’s complaints gain more oxygen than others is partly his effectiveness as a communicator and partly the weight his club carries as a recent premiership contender. When the Cats underperform, there is a natural appetite — among media, among rival supporters and perhaps even among some Cats fans — to understand why. The fixture becomes a convenient explanatory variable.

But explanatory variables and excuses occupy a spectrum, and it is worth being precise about which end of that spectrum we are dealing with. The Cats have lost games this season in circumstances that no fixture analyst would attribute to scheduling inequity. They have been beaten in the contest, in the midfield brigade, at stoppages, in tight finishes. Those losses live in the football column, not the administrative one.

The Contention Claim Deserves Respect

Here is where I want to be genuinely balanced, because the lazy take would be to simply dismiss Scott’s confidence in his team’s September prospects as wishful thinking from a coach protecting his charges. I don’t think that’s the full picture.

Geelong remain a side with elite-level football intelligence, a coaching group that has demonstrated sustained excellence over more than a decade, and individual matchwinners who have operated at the highest level under pressure. They have, on numerous occasions throughout the Scott era, been written off at various points of a season and responded with football of genuine quality. Dismissing their contention prospects entirely would be the kind of hot take that tends to age poorly.

What Scott is really saying, beneath the fixture rhetoric, is that the Cats’ percentage and ladder position do not accurately reflect their capability. That may be true. It is certainly something their opponents would be foolish to discount entirely. The granny has been contested by sides who looked shakier than this at equivalent points of the season.

The Political Dimension Worth Watching

As someone who keeps a close eye on AFL Commission and governance matters, I think Scott’s public campaign on the fixture does serve an additional purpose that goes beyond this particular season. He is, arguably, building a record. Every time a senior, credentialed coach raises structural concerns about the fixture in a public forum, it increases the pressure on the Commission to address those concerns in a documented, transparent way.

The AFL’s broadcast and scheduling arrangements are entering another significant period of renegotiation and review in the coming years. Having respected football voices on the record about fixture inequity creates a useful pressure point. Scott is smart enough to understand that. Whether his motivations are purely about Geelong’s 2025 season or whether there is a longer-range strategic calculation at play is a question worth sitting with.

The Commission, to its credit, has generally been responsive — even if slowly — to sustained, evidenced complaints from clubs about scheduling. The introduction of various travel concessions and rest-day adjustments over the years reflects that responsiveness. Scott’s public musings may well contribute to the next round of refinements, regardless of where the Cats fin in this particular season.

What Geelong Actually Needs to Fix

Setting aside the politics, the football reality for Geelong is that their path back into genuine contention runs through improvements that Scott himself would readily acknowledge have nothing to do with the fixture. Their forward line has been inconsistant in terms of converting chances that a side of Geelong’s quality should be putting away. Their defensive structure, historically one of the most reliable in the competition, has shown vulnerabilties in transition that better sides will continue to exploit if they go deep into finals.

The midfield, which for a long time was the engine room that drove everything, looks to be navigating a generational shift in a way that has not yet settled into a reliable new rhythm. These are football problems, and they require football solutions — better connection between units, clearer role definition for the emerging players who are asked to shoulder more responsibility than they might have been ready for, and the kind of focused preparation in the back half of the season that this coaching group has demonstrated repeatedly they are capable of delivering.

A Fair Verdict

Chris Scott is one of the more thoughtful and intellectually rigorous coaches the competition has produced, and his concerns about the fixture deserve to be engaged with seriously rather than dismissed as sour grapes. There are legitimate structural questions about how the AFL schedules its competition, and those questions benefit from having articulate, prominent voices raising them.

But the Cats’ supporters — and Scott himself, in his more candid moments — will know that fixture equity is not what separates Geelong from being a premiership team right now. The gap is football-shaped, and it needs to be closed on the training track and in the contest, not in a press conference. The good news for Cats fans is that under Scott, they have demonstrated the capacity to make exactly that kind of mid-season correction.

Whether they do so in 2025 is the genuinely interesting question. The fixture grievances, legitimate or otherwise, are ultimately a sideshow to that central drama.