Longmire To Essendon: We Finally Poached Someone GOOD

I’ve had to read the press release four times because my first thought was ‘righto, what’s the catch, is he suspended, is there an ASADA angle, does he need to serve out a rest-of-season ban before he can start.’ Turns out there isn’t one. John Longmire, premiership coach, four-time grand finalist, absolute legend of the game, is walking through the doors at Tullamarine as our new head of performance. I had to sit down.

For those keeping score at home, this is genuinely one of the biggest gets this footy club has made in my lifetime that didn’t involve a supplements program, a court date or a first-round pick being sacrificed to the football gods. We just… signed a bloke. A good bloke. Everyone’s happy. It feels illegal.

Why This One Actually Matters

Look, I’ve watched this club chase ‘culture resets’ like it’s a hobby. We’ve had reviews into reviews. We’ve had head of wellbeing, head of list management, head of standing in the outer looking concerned – I reckon at one stage we had more executives than actual footballers who could kick it forty metres on a wet Friday night. So forgive my scepticism when another title with ‘head of’ in it gets announced.

But Longmire is different, and not just because he coached a genuinely hard, disciplined, contested-footy Swans outfit for the best part of fifteen years. It’s because he’s been in the trenches. He’s had his own dramas, his own tribunal headaches with players over the journey, his own media pile-ons after a September exit that didn’t go to plan. He knows what it looks like when a footy club is under siege from the outside and needs someone calm in the middle of it. Essendon, as most of you reading this will know all too well, has had a bit of practice being under siege.

The Bombers And The Tribunal: A Complicated Love Story

I say this with love, genuine love, because I’ve bled red and black through every single one of these sagas: this football club has basically become an unofficial testing ground for the MRO and the Tribunal system. We’ve had bans overturned, bans upheld, appeals that went to the death, rules that got rewritten practically because of us. I sometimes reckon the AFL’s legal department has a folder just for Essendon marked ‘here we go again’.

So when I hear Longmire is coming in on the performance side, my first thought genuinely was: does this bloke know what he’s signing up for? Does he understand that ‘performance’ at this football club sometimes means performance in front of a tribunal panel rather than performance out on the ground? I say that as a joke, mostly. But only mostly.

What Head Of Performance Even Means In 2025

Half of you are probably wondering what this job actually entails, because footy departments these days have more layers than a lasagne. From what’s been put out publicly, this isn’t him walking back into a senior coaching box – he’s not taking Brad’s job, calm down keyboard warriors – it’s a broader remit across how the whole football program ticks, from midfield structures to how we prepare our best 22 for finals football, assuming we ever see finals football again in my adult lifetime.

What I like about it is that it’s not another feel-good title. Longmire built genuinely tough, contested, disciplined sides at the Swans for the better part of a decade and a half. He didn’t win a flag by accident and he didn’t stay at one club that long by being a soft touch. If he brings even a slice of that structure and accountability to our program, it’s a genuine coup, not just a name for the members’ newsletter.

The Bombers Fan’s Curse: Cautious Optimism

Now, I need to manage expectations here, because Essendon fans have been burned so many times we should qualify for workers comp. We’ve heard ‘culture reset’ before. We’ve heard ‘best practice’ before. We’ve had consultants fly in from interstate, deliver a Powerpoint, and fly out again while our list management continued to resemble a share house whiteboard of chores nobody does.

But this feels different because it isn’t a consultant, it’s a proven premiership coach who chose us. He wasn’t made redundant somewhere and looking for a soft landing – by all reports he had options and picked the Bombers. That’s the bit that actually gets me. Somebody with runs on the board, who could’ve coasted into a media gig or an ambassador role, looked at Essendon Football Club in 2025 and thought ‘yeah, I want a piece of fixing that’.

As one bloke down at my local put it after a few too many on Friday night: ‘mate, we’ve finally recruited someone we don’t have to explain to the kids.’ Fair point, and also slighty depressing that it needed saying.

What It Means For Brad Scott And The Coaching Group

I don’t think this is a shot at Bradley at all – if anything it should take pressure off him. Good senior coaches want strong people around them, not yes-men nodding along in meetings. Longmire’s presence gives Scott another elite football brain to lean on, someone who’s actually been the man in the arena during a grand final week, who’s had to manage a locker room through a losing September and a winning one. That’s invaluable stuff you can’t buy off a whiteboard.

It also sends a signal to our list, and to any player weighing up whether Essendon is a destination or a stopgap, that the football department is serious about getting better. Recruiting a coach of Longmire’s stature isn’t cheap and it isn’t easy – other clubs would’ve wanted a piece of him too – so credit where it’s due to whoever in our footy department made this phone call and closed the deal.

The Bottom Line, Riggsy Style

Am I getting ahead of myself dreaming about September footy off the back of one appointment, even a really good one? Probably. This club has taught me, through repeated painful lessons, not to get too far ahead of myself about anything. We’ve all had our hearts broken by hype before.

But I’ll say this much: for the first time in a long while, a piece of Essendon news dropped and my first reaction wasn’t dread, it wasn’t ‘here we go again’, it wasn’t reaching for the Panadol before reading the Tribunal outcome. It was actual, uncomplicated excitement. John Longmire is walking into our building. Let’s see what he does with it. Go Bombers.