It's the immediacy of a decision to sack an AFL coach which often makes it seem a shock more so than the pros and cons of his claims to the position. Such is the case with now former Melbourne coach Simon Goodwin.
There can't be too many coaches who've "got the flick" after the sort of resounding 83-point win Melbourne enjoyed against West Coast last Saturday. Not too many in recent times who've been tipped out with only three games of a season remaining, either.
But the portents haven't been good for "Goody" for a while now. Certainly not in terms of Melbourne's on-field performances, which have subsided from a drought-breaking premiership, to two more top four finishes (but without a finals win), to now missing the finals for two seasons straight.
The other obvious factors in Goodwin's sacking, despite having another year remaining on his contract with the club, are firstly the disruption -- some might say dysfunction -- at the top of Melbourne's administrative tree for some time now. Then there's the availability of several highly-credentialed alternative coaching candidates.
Last year's review of Melbourne's football department might have tinkered around the edges of the program, but it also left only one direction to go should the Demons not improve substantially on 2024's pretty dismal efforts. They haven't.
There's also increasing pressure on the club to at least be seen to be doing something after somehow drifting through much of this year effectively without an officially-annointed chief executive or president (incoming CEO Paul Guerra doesn't enter the fray until September, and new president Stephen Smith has been on a European sojourn).
As for where the club heads with its coaching, well, much of that depends upon whether whoever actually is in charge of the club determines that the Demons are still in a position to contend, or are effectively in list terms starting afresh. And even that judgement might rest to a large extent on whether the likes of Christian Petracca or Clayton Oliver stay or go.
In terms of next coach, Melbourne isn't short of options. Two premiership coaches in John Longmire and Adam Simpson are available. There's a Grand Final coach in Nathan Buckley. Plus the usual parade of current AFL assistant coaches all with their various groups of supporters.
Opinions will be divided on just how much Goodwin's replacement has to work with. While they're not short on star quality (think Petracca, Oliver, Max Gawn, Kysaiah Pickett, Steven May), the Demons are the fourth-oldest playing group in the AFL, with nine players on the cusp of 30 or older, a mid-tier group of which several have stagnated, and some promising but still largely unproven younger hands.
Should Goodwin have made more of the talent at his disposal? Perhaps. But that simplistic assessment also ignores the simple and very significant fact that he was the man who took a foundation league club to its first premiership in 57 years. That on its own, should enshrine his legacy.
Melbourne had lengthy periods of competitiveness during those near-six decades in the wilderness, but it also had longer spells where it was a competition joke, as recently as a decade ago, in fact. Yes, Paul Roos' work in lifting Melbourne from a rabble to respectability at least was critical and needs to be acknowledged.
But it was still then-untried senior coach Goodwin who had to parlay that profile into something of more substance and he did that and a lot more. His Melbourne record ends at nine seasons, 203 games and a very handy strike rate of nearly 55%.
Melbourne hadn't played finals for more than a decade but went within half a percentage point of doing so in 2017, Goodwin's first season as senior coach. In his second, the Demons made it to a preliminary final.
And in his fifth, Melbourne famously (though sadly not on its own MCG) broke its premiership drought with one of the most amazing Grand Final performances in history.
Down by 19 points against the Western Bulldogs midway through the third quarter, Goodwin's team exploded into a hail of goals (16 to just one for the remainder of the game) to smash the Dogs by an eventual 74 points.
Goodwin's Melbourne at its peak was in a class of its own as a tough, contested ball-winning team. It was never creating opportunities to score which was ever an issue for the Dees, it was about converting them.
But when the delivery was more systematic and the forward structure at its most productive, like at the end of 2021 when Ben Brown was the hard-leading key forward who created space and opportunities for others like Bayley Fritsch, Melbourne could at times be close to untouchable.
Even then, though, you need a slice of luck, and the Dees and Goodwin missed out on that score a few times, like those consecutive finals series of 2022-23 when Melbourne went out in straight sets on both occasions.
Both times, they'd won 16 games, overrun the first of those Septembers by Sydney then Brisbane.
They were dead stiff in 2023, though, losing a qualifying final to Collingwood by just seven points after losing key playmaker Angus Brayshaw early and despite having 32 more inside 50 entries, then the following week by just two points to Carlton after kicking 9.17.
A couple of bounces of the football or shots sailing the right side of goalposts, and Goodwin is right now still very much in the Melbourne coaching chair with no end in sight.
That's not how football works, though, and the pragmatic former Adelaide premiership player and now former Melbourne coach knows that as well as anyone. In the modern AFL environment, you can be sacked yet still be seen to have been successful. On that score, I reckon Goodwin measures up pretty well.
You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at FOOTYOLOGY.