AFL football throws up all sorts of increasingly complex statistics to measure performance. Many of them are revealing, too. But still not even remotely as enlightening as that one called the scoreboard.
Converting scoring opportunities into goals rather than behinds is the single most fundamental skill in the game. And round two of the new AFL season hammered that point home pretty effectively.
Three losing teams - the Western Bulldogs, Geelong and Essendon - all had more shots at goal and scores than their opponent.
The Bulldogs were running over the top of Carlton, but a last-quarter return of 2.7 tells its own story. Essendon should have had a far bigger lead against Brisbane but shot itself in the foot with 4.5 in the first term.
And in the "Buddy" show up in Sydney, Geelong managed five more scores than the Swans but still lost by five goals, the stark contrast the Cats' 10 goals 17 to Sydney's super accurate 17.5.
That's a conversion rate of 37 per cent as opposed to 77 per cent. And when the scoreboard reward for hitting the target is six times what you get for missing, the importance is pretty obvious.
Why don't goalkickers spend more time working on what should be their bread and butter?
Yet when we analyse games, a teams' simple capacity or inability to convert scoring chances doesn't get nearly as much airtime as a host of other statistical indicators, which don't have anything like as direct or profound an impact on victory or defeat as shots at goal.
Why is that? Well, without trying to sound too cynical, while you can spend hours discussing how teams go about increasing their contested possession numbers or defensive pressure rating, you can only say so much about a kick, which either goes between the big sticks or misses. If it's the latter, there's only ever one remedy - greater accuracy.
Surely, AFL football isn't so clever by half that kicking straight for goal seems somehow too simplistic and self-explanatory for the game's greatest minds and greatest coaches to concern themselves with?
But it still feels that way sometimes. We have the same discussions about it all and ask the same questions year after year.
Why don't goalkickers spend more time working on what should be their bread and butter? Why won't the fitness people let them practice kicking at goal more? Why have scorelines in recent years been the most inaccurate we've seen?
Indeed, Champion Data tell us that since 2016, accuracy across the competition has run at less than 50 per cent.
We never seem to get answers to those questions. We don't even talk about inaccuracy that much. We talk more about stuff which, in the end, matters a lot less but perhaps sounds a lot more cutting edge.
I've been hearing the AFL's best goalkickers complain about not being allowed to practice enough their bread and butter skill by their own fitness people for at least a couple of decades now.
Have clubs in all that time really not been able to incorporate more work on those players' most important craft with a training schedule designed to avoid the greater risk of soft tissue injury? Shouldn't doing so have been an obvious priority all this time?
One obvious issue, even on the training track, is being able to replicate the environment and pressure of a clutch shot at goal during a real match. That one isn't easily answered. But I'm sure there are clubs that could do more to mirror that experience in training and match simulation.
Recorded crowd noise. Actual crowds (who wouldn't want to watch their team train AND know they'd made a valuable contribution to its preparation?) I've seen occasional examples of the former in recent times, but that's about it.
This week, I spoke to a current AFL coach about the issue. He didn't want to go on the record so as not to upset his fitness people, but agreed not enough time was spent on simply nailing shots at goal.
He also believes good kicking technique is increasingly lacking in younger generations of kids being taught the game.
In other words, there's only so much AFL coaching programs can do once players have come into the elite level of the game. Or alternately, the damage has already been done.
But does that mean clubs shouldn't even attempt to undo it?
Think about the numbers of AFL players now using a side-on kicking technique when it comes to kicking at goal, even from directly in front.
Do we know with any confidence the "round the corner" method offers a greater margin for error? Wouldn't that be worth some sort of forensic research by clubs? Perhaps more would focus on it were they to catalogue more frequently the numbers of games they'd blown simply by not kicking the ball between the two goalposts.
Kicking at goal is such an obviously critical part of what determines winning or losing that it seems too simple. Yet if it is, why do AFL teams still struggle to master conversion at a consistently winning rate?
The coach - or coaches - who can go at least some of the way to answering that question won't want for job opportunities.
Nor, it goes without saying, want for success.
