Drummond’s Apology Doesn’t Settle the Governance Question at All

Craig Drummond has done the thing that senior officials in this competition rarely do without weeks of legal massaging first: he has said, plainly, that the club he used to run “went too far”. It is a rare moment of candour from the Commission chair, and it deserves some credit. But it also leaves hanging, rather awkwardly, the much larger question of what the AFL itself intends to do about it.

For those who have not followed the detail, the substance of the matter is this: Geelong entered into a concussion-related arrangement with defender Jake Kolodjashnij, agreed in 2024, that has since been characterised as a waiver of sorts — one that appears to have been kept from public view until it emerged this week. Drummond, who sat on the Cats’ board at the time the deal was struck and later became club president before moving into the Commission chair’s role, has now apologised for what he called “the mistakes made in this very complex situation”, while confirming he will step back from any AFL assessment of the case.

An Apology Is Not the Same as an Answer

There is something to be said for an administrator fronting the media and using the word “apologise” without hedging it into meaninglessness. Too often in sports governance, contrition arrives dressed up as regret “if anyone was offended” or similar non-apologies. Drummond, to his credit, did not do that here. He named the failing — that the club overstepped what was appropriate in dealing with a player’s health — and he owned it as something that happened on his watch.

But an apology from a former club president is a different animal to an explanation from the man who now chairs the body meant to regulate the entire competition, including player welfare and workplace safety standards that clubs are bound to uphold. Drummond wearing both hats in this saga — the Geelong hat he has taken off, and the Commission hat he still wears — is precisely why his declaration that he will recuse himself from any AFL review is the correct call. It is also, frankly, the bare minimum. Recusal deals with the conflict of interest. It does not deal with the substance of what actually happened, why it happened, and whether concussion protocols as currently constructed leave enough room for this kind of arrangement to occur at all.

Concussion Management Deserves More Than a Club-Level Fix

Whatever the precise mechanics of the Kolodjashnij arrangement — and the AFL has not yet laid out every detail publicly — the broader context here matters enormously. Concussion in this game is no longer a peripheral medical issue that can be quietly negotiated between a club and a player behind closed doors. It sits at the heart of the code’s social licence, its litigation exposure, and its duty of care to the men who put their bodies and brains on the line every week. Any arrangement that has the flavour of a private waiver, reached without full transparency to the game’s own medical oversight structures, ought to trouble every supporter of every club, not just those who follow the Cats.

It is worth remembering that concussion management protocols exist precisely because individual clubs, understandably desperate to have their best players available, cannot be trusted to mark their own homework on this question. That is not a slight on Geelong specifically — it is simply human nature within a competitive industry. The whole point of centralised, AFL-mandated concussion rules is to take those decisions partly out of clubs’ hands. If a side effectively worked around that framework with a bespoke deal, however well-intentioned, then the failure is not merely Geelong’s. It is a failure of the system that allowed such a deal to be struck and to remain secret for as long as it did.

The Governance Optics Are Not Ideal

Andrew Dillon’s refusal, when asked at the weekend, to say whether Drummond ought to stand aside from his Commission role altogether is understandable from a chief executive’s perspective — he will not want to pre-empt whatever review or investigation follows, nor create the impression that the AFL is dispensing with its own chair on the run. But it does leave the game in an uncomfortable holding pattern, where the man ultimately responsible for the Commission’s integrity is personally entangled in the very episode that Commission may need to examine.

In my view, the sensible path is not to demand Drummond’s immediate resignation on the back of one news cycle — that would be an overreaction, and Australian sport has a bad habit of treating every governance stumble as an execution rather than a lesson. But the AFL does need to commission a review that is genuinely independent of both Geelong and the Commission chair, with terms of reference made public, and a clear account given to fans and clubs alike of how such an arrangement came to exist and why it stayed hidden.

What Fans Actually Want to Know

• Was Kolodjashnij’s welfare properly served by whatever arrangement was reached, independent of who benefited competitively?
• Did the AFL’s medical and integrity units have visibility of the deal at the time, or only after the fact?
• What role, if any, did Drummond play personally in approving or endorsing the arrangement while on the Geelong board?
• What changes, if any, are needed to prevent similar club-level arrangements occurring without central oversight in future?

These are not questions that an apology, however sincerely delivered, can answer on its own. They require documentation, timelines and a body genuinely at arm’s length from both parties.

A Test of the Game’s Own Standards

Every club in this competition, my own included, has at various points found itself under the pump over how it handled a player’s health, a doctor’s advice, or a coach’s impatience to have a body back on the park. That is the nature of a professional sport built on both loyalty to the jumper and pressure to win. What separates a competition with credible governance from one that merely talks about it is whether, when these situations surface, the review process is rigorous rather than convenient, and whether conflicts of interest are managed with genuine distance rather than a polite recusal followed by silence.

Drummond’s apology was a reasonable first step. Whether it amounts to accountability, or simply the softening blow before a quieter, less scrutinised resolution, is the story that actually matters from here. The competition, and certainly every supporter who worries about the head knocks their favourite players cop each week, deserves to see this through properly rather than watch it fade from the news cycle once the apology has done its job.