A few weeks ago I looked at how the West Coast Eagles had blown a unique opportunity to leverage teams matching bids on elite rated prospects at the AFL draft by executing a no-compete clause.
Having turned my mind to 2026, I might have to revise that statement. To borrow from one of the truly great sports commentators of all time, Murray Walker of F1 fame, “The 2025 AFL Draft is absolutely unique, except for the one after it which is identical.”
I expect the Eagles to finish last in 2026, though with the team’s recent ignominious history, that wouldn’t be an echo as much as a Hall of Mirrors carnival exhibit where there are a million identical versions of their inadequacies staring right back at us.
That’s what it’s like to support the Eagles right now.
The reason the Eagles will likely finish last is pretty simple – taking nearly 1,000 games of experience out of a team that only won a single game is a recipe for pain.
That said, some other AFL teams are limited, and could take the Eagles’ wooden spoon. For instance, the Eagles might make a similarly inexcusable mistake like North Melbourne in 2023, and win a meaningless game on the last day of the season to cost themselves the chance to draft the most highly rated prospect in living memory.
A week is a long time in football, so a year is an eternity – particularly for a 17- or 18-year old. Still, it’s quite clear to most informed professional prognosticators that the two best prospects of the 2026 AFL Draft are Dougie Cochrane (Port Adelaide tied) and Cody Walker (Carlton tied). One of those two young men will go at pick 1, almost certainly followed immediately by the other.
Let’s compare their developmental advantages with that of Koby LeCras, son of Eagles great Mark, at West Perth. Two of those three young men will train with AFL teams. One of them will train with a WAFL team. That matters.
The AFL are almost certainly going to rubber stamp a plan to make it harder to match bids at the top of the draft, with rumours suggesting that clubs will only be able to use two picks to match a bid. Talk persists that the 10 per cent discount on matching bids could go by the wayside too.
So this is where the Eagles come into the picture, with that uniquely not-so-unique leverage that they wasted in 2025.
If you’re the wooden spooner, you can now do something unheard of in AFL history. You can force a bidding war between Carlton and Port on who to bid on first. Since you can’t bid on both of them at 1, one of those two teams is going to be happier than the other.
Let’s go back to Port, and assume the Eagles make them two offers. The first offer: not to bid on Cochrane at 1 (forcing the bid down to pick 2). The second offer is to bid on Walker at 1, then take somebody else at 2, forcing Cochrane’s bid back to 3.
Now let’s open doors for business. What are you going to pay me to run dead on your boy?
A good starting point would be for Port to give the Eagles two second-round picks at the 2026 draft in exchange for forcing a bid for Cochrane back to 3, meaning their existing third-round pick by itself would be enough excess points to match the bid.
To add to this, Port happen to have Carlton’s 2026 second-round pick. Imagine the gnashing of teeth on Lygon Street if Port used Carlton’s own pick to force them to match a bid on Walker at 1?
That might be reason enough for them to find a way to give up extra to out-bid Port. Maybe they’ll offer to slide their 2026 first-round pick, tied to Sydney, back to the Eagles’ third-round pick.
You could even get a second-round pick out of BOTH of Port and Carlton by promising to pick neither of Cochrane or Walker at 1, and allowing the team with pick 2 to play the same game.
The upshot is that the wooden spooner in 2026, West Coast or otherwise, has a lot of tools in their kit to expedite their rise from the bottom. Take the best un-contracted non-free-agent player in 2026 in the pre-season draft, the best non-club-tied draft prospect, and potentially add a couple of second-round picks – that’s the means for a quick turnaround right there.
For my Eagles, this could very reasonably look like adding Jed Walter from Gold Coast, and two extra second-round picks to their arsenal (in exchange for nothing) at the end of 2026.
That would be very nice indeed.
Mincehttps://https://ift.tt/NJo75iS the Eagles can hijack the 2026 AFL draft … and fast-track their rebuild
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