Conventional football wisdom says in order to succeed, you need your best players playing well. But is it possible they play so well it actually gives you a false read on an entire team's capabilities? I wonder if Sydney is providing some decent evidence that might be the case?
What is indisputable only halfway through the season is that, barring some sort of miracle turnaround, the Swans, like Adelaide and GWS before them, are the latest victims of the "Grand Final thrashing curse".
Dean Cox's team would need to win at least nine of its last 11 games and have several other teams fall in a heap to even reach the finals. The Swans have come from nowhere to make it a couple of times over the years, but it ain't happening in 2025; they're simply too far gone.
Injuries clearly have taken a massive toll on the Swans' fortunes, Errol Gulden, Tom Papley and Callum Mills' extended absences enough to seriously disrupt any AFL list. There's been other loss of personnel which has severely upset the structure of Cox's teams. Now, with each passing defeat, you can feel Sydney's confidence ebbing away.
But even allowing for those factors, were the Swans actually, even at their highest peak last year, quite as good as we thought they were?
Take, for example, some of the more hyperbolic comparisons to Essendon's famous 2000 premiership outfit (which lost only one game in 25) made midway through last season, when Sydney was three games clear in top spot, with 13 wins from 14 games. Those look a little silly now.
Was the football world, perhaps even the Swans themselves, deceived some by the incredible run of form from their three best players -- Gulden, Isaac Heeney and Chad Warner?
That trio were a runaway top three in Sydney's best and fairest. More than that, though, they were pivotal to the Swans' high performance across two-thirds of the ground, in both midfield and attack.
Heeney, Warner and Gulden between them kicked 84 goals in 2024, finishing fifth, sixth and eighth in the league goalkicking respectively. They were also easily Sydney's leading three possession getters, at significantly higher rates than any of their teammates. They all finished within the top 10 of the AFL Coaches Association Player of the Year award after three of the finest individual seasons seen for some time.
Making the consequences of Gulden's complete absence this season through a serious ankle injury, and the more subdued form of Heeney and Warner, more dire than might the absence of another team's leading lights.
Calling what they were able to do in 2024 papering over the cracks for Sydney might be a little harsh. After all, the Swans did finish a game clear on top of the ladder, were No. 1 for scoring and until the final home and away round No. 3 for defence.
But if the narrow defeats against lesser-ranked teams in the back half of last season, then the 112-point debacle at the hands of Port Adelaide in Round 21, then some unconvincing wins didn't ring alarm bells, the embarrassing 10-goal Grand Final belting against Brisbane, in conjunction with those things, needed to serve as a major alert.
Even last season, key forwards Joel Amartey, Logan McDonald, and Hayden McLean weren't overly convincing.
Now they're both unconvincing and perpetually injured (McDonald), suspended (Amartey). and in even worse touch (McLean), the Swans reduced for much of this season to playing the likes of regular defenders Tom McCartin and Joel Hamling as pinch-hitting would-be goalkickers.
Even Aaron Francis, nowhere near the senior team last year, quickly somehow became seen as critical to the forward structure after a few late goals against Port Adelaide. That's not a healthy state of affairs.
As obvious as it looks now that the Swans desperately need the key forward likes of a Jamarra Ugle-Hagan or Carlton's Harry McKay, you can understand why, having finished 2024 the highest-scoring team in the competition and with Amartey and McDonald at least having kicked 80 goals between them, Sydney held fast.
It's easy now to call that steadfastness a grave error, of course. But it wasn't bold or brave list management, either. And the Swans are paying for that reticence.
What also gave Sydney such an exciting look when the Swans rose from the lower depths of the ladder in 2020 to the 2022 Grand Final, was the influence of then still-raw kids like Warner, Gulden, McLean, Justin McInerney and Braeden Campbell, combined with a still-solid old guard of Luke Parker, Josh Kennedy and co.
Right now, though, Sydney is getting precious little from either end of the list. If you're looking for tangible evidence of that Grand Final thrashing syndrome, Swans veterans Dane Rampe and Jake Lloyd may well provide it.
Those two, who have now each played in four Grand Final losses, three of them by 10 goals or more, really do look like all the constantly getting to the pointy end of the season only to fall apart has genuinely sucked the life and enthusiasm from them, shells of their former selves.
And there's been nothing like the emergence of those young tyros since, Sydney's inclusions to the mix over the last two years not hitting nearly the same highs and delivering their best far more sporadically.
It's fine to be "blooding the kids" when things are going well. But there's nothing like a catalogue of serious injuries to really test the depth of a senior list. And so far this season, under extreme duress admittedly, Sydney's has looked woefully inadequate.
Perhaps more of these structural and list deficiencies might have been glaringly apparent last year, and Sydney forced into a far more pro-active off-season on the player management front, had Heeney, Warner and Gulden not been so outstanding.
And how ironic that Sydney might in 2025 actually be getting punished not only for not being good enough now, but for some of its brightest stars of 2024 having indeed been too good then.
You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at FOOTYOLOGY.