Stinear’s Number Crunch Has Geelong Playing Like It’s 1995 Again

I’ve watched enough footy since the days when they still called it the VFL to know that the biggest improvements rarely come from the big-name recruit everyone carries on about at the trade table. More often than not it’s some quiet fella in a polo shirt with a laptop who nobody outside the club has heard of, and this year at Geelong that fella is Mick Stinear.

Now I’m no Cats man, never have been, never will be, and I’ll take the chance here to remind everyone that I still think 1995 was the greatest side never to win the flag, my beloved Blues aside. But you can’t watch what’s gone on down at Kardinia Park this pre-season and into round one without tipping the hat, grudgingly, to what this bloke has done to their method.

Who is this Stinear fella anyway

For those who haven’t been paying attention, Stinear didn’t arrive at Geelong with a boot deal or a highlight reel. He came in as a development and strategy type, the sort of appointment that gets a paragraph on page nine of the paper and not much else. Back in my day you didn’t have blokes like this at all, you had a fitness bloke, a runner, and a coach who yelled at you at three-quarter time and that was the extent of the science. Now every club’s got an army of them, and most of the time I reckon it’s overkill, tinkering for tinkering’s sake dressed up as innovation.

But every now and then one of these appointments actually changes how a team plays footy, not just how they recover from a hamstring strain, and that’s what’s happened at Geelong. The stat everyone’s talking about is contested possession differential inside their own defensive 50, which sounds like the sort of thing a AFL number-cruncher dreams up to justify their salary, but stick with me because it actually means something.

The stat that’s got everyone talking

Geelong’s defensive contested win rate in their back half has jumped significantly compared to last season, and it’s not because they’ve gone out and bought a bull of a key defender. It’s because Stinear has drilled into them a method of setting up around stoppages that lets their smaller, cannier types win the hard ball back before it ever becomes a genuine scoring chance for the opposition. In old money, they’re winning the argument at the coalface before the other side even gets a shot at goal.

It’s not flashy. There’s no highlight reel goal from fifty out that gets replayed on the telly all week. It’s the sort of stat that wins you finals in September without anyone outside the club really noticing until round fifteen when you look up the ladder and the Cats are sitting pretty again, same as they always seem to be, much to my irritation.

Why this matters more than another key forward

Every off-season the same argument gets trotted out — clubs need to trade for a genuine tall forward, a key defender, a bloke who kicks fifty goals and solves all your problems. I’ve made that argument myself plenty of times about my own Blues, and I’ll probably make it again this trade period because old habits die hard. But Geelong’s 2026 season is proving something that us traditionalists don’t love admitting: sometimes the difference between finals and finishing mid-table isn’t a player at all, it’s a system that squeezes more out of the same list.

You could argue Geelong’s list hasn’t fundamentally changed player for player, but the way they use that list absolutely has, and that’s down to the structure Stinear has put in place around contested footy at ground level.

I’ll admit I don’t love where the modern game’s gone with all this measurement of everything under the sun, and part of me still thinks the coaches back in my day who never looked at a stat sheet in their life won just as many flags with nothing but instinct and a hard word at half time. But you can’t argue with results, and Geelong’s early form suggests this isn’t just a fluke of a good draw.

The bit that should worry the rest of the competition

What should really worry the other twelve, sorry seventeen, clubs is that this sort of structural change tends to compound. Once a list buys into a method like this, once young blokes learn it as the way things are done rather than a trick for one season, it becomes part of the club’s DNA. Geelong have form here — they’ve had a habit for the best part of two decades now of finding the right voice at the right time and building something sustainable around it, and it drives opposition fans, including this one, absolutely spare.

A word of caution before we crown them

Now I won’t sit here and hand Geelong a premiership cup in March, because I’ve seen enough sides talked up after a hot start only to fall in a heap come finals time, and head office keeps changing the rules often enough that nobody can build anything with real certainty from one year to the next. The interchange cap, the six-six-six, whatever they dream up next — it all makes it harder for any method to bed down properly, and I do wonder how long Stinear’s system holds up once the opposition analysts get a proper look at the tape and start working out countermeasures.

But for now, watching Geelong dominate at grond level without a marquee recruit to point to is a lesson worth taking on board for every list manager in the competition, my own club included. It’s proof that the game, for all its faults and all its meddling from head office, still rewards the sides who do the basics better than everyone else, even if those basics are now measured in numbers rather than gut feel.

The old man’s final word

I’ll grumble about the stats revolution till the day I die, and I’ll always reckon a bloke with thirty years in the game watching from the outer knows more than half these spreadsheet merchants. But credit where it’s due — Mick Stinear has found something real, and Geelong are better for it. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.