Harris Andrews has been the AFL’s best defender for six years.

Champion Data’s own ratings say so. The All-Australian selection panel says so — five times, in a row. Brisbane’s defensive rank with him versus without him says so. The AFL Coaches’ Association: yes. The vibes: extremely yes.

His overall KICK Rating is 41.

For comparison, the #100 midfielder on our leaderboard — a replacement-level inside-mid with 95 games on his career — sits at 58.

That gap is not a bug. It’s the rating working exactly as designed.

KICK Rating v1 was built to agree with the awards: the Brownlow, the All-Australian squad, the AFLCA Champion Player of the Year. Those awards reward midfielders. Umpires vote inside-mids. AA panels pick inside-mids. Coach votes go to inside-mids. So KICK, tuned to agree, also over-indexes inside-mids. Give the rating a defender playing the best defence of his generation, and the rating says 41.

We spent months trying to fix this inside the overall formula. We failed three times. Today we’re doing the thing we should have done first: publish a separate leaderboard per position.

What we tried, what failed

The full version of this story is on our validation page, but the short version runs like this.

v1.2 was a 48-config weight sweep. Nudge weights up for intercepts, marks-inside-50, rebound-50s; hunt for a combination that closes the position gap without dragging Brownlow alignment below the binding floor. No config passed.

v1.3 moved to three new mechanisms — role-aware weighting (defenders get 2.5× one-percenters), a scoring-involvement composite for forwards, and an era normaliser for pre-2000 games. 32-config mechanism sweep. No config passed.

v1.4 was the richer-data hypothesis. We scraped 2,879 AFL match-centre pages (every Premiership match 2012–2025) and added seven new fields to the rating’s components — intercept marks, score involvements, hit-outs-to-advantage, pressure acts, metres gained, intercepts, forward-50 ground-ball gets. Then we swept 972 configs. Same six binding criteria.

Zero of 972 passed.

The pattern: every lever that closes the position gap by lifting defenders simultaneously drops midfielders in year-by-year top-10s. Drop mids in the top-10 and you lose Brownlow agreement. Lose Brownlow agreement and AFLCA agreement craters with it, because coaches vote like umpires. Intercept marks at weight 5 produced the single best config in v1.4 — defender gap down 41% — but Brownlow landed at 3.58 against the 3.81 floor, All-Australian overlap stalled at 45.8% vs the 50% target, and AFLCA held at 82.6% vs the 87% target.

Three versions. Same tension. The criteria encode a tradeoff no single-number rating can solve: “match award-voting distributions” and “rate positions proportional to impact” are genuinely incompatible when umpires overwhelmingly vote mids.

So we stopped trying to collapse both goals into one number.

The change

Effective today, kicker.au publishes Positional KICK as a companion metric to the overall rating. Every classified player now carries two numbers:

And we’ve shipped a complete new leaderboard surface:

How Positional KICK actually works

KICK-P isn’t a filter on v1.1 scores. It’s a re-scoring of every player through a position-aware formula, then calibrated so that the top player at each position lands near 100 regardless of the raw-volume gap between positions.

The formula: the v1.4 sweep’s top-1 configuration — intercept_marks weight 5.0 plus the role-aware moderate preset (defenders get one_percenters ×2.5 and rebound_50s ×2.0; forwards get marks_inside_50 ×2.5 and goal_assists ×1.5; rucks get hit_outs ×1.4) plus the era normaliser (pre-1965 ÷1.0, 1965–99 ÷1.4, 2000+ ÷1.9). Nothing else. We tested layering hit-outs-to-advantage, score involvements, pressure acts — either they made ruck numbers unrealistically high or they moved the needle by less than a point. The cleanest version is the simplest.

The calibration: after the formula runs, we apply a per-position percentile-anchored rescale so that within each position, the median pro lands at 50, the top 20% at 62, the top 5% at 76, the top 1% at 88, and the all-time #1 at 100. That anchors elite tiers at readable heights without crushing the top 5 into a tie.

Full rationale is on the positional explainer.

What the top 10 per position actually looks like

Current (active-player) leaderboards, rolling-40 KICK-P. As of Round 7, 2026:

Top 10 defenders (KICK-D)

# Player Team Games KICK-D R40 Career KICK ref
1 James Sicily Hawthorn 184 98 99 53
2 Tom Stewart Geelong 187 97 100 53
3 Callum Wilkie St Kilda 160 95 83 44
4 Jordan Ridley Essendon 99 93 90 48
5 Luke Ryan Fremantle 183 92 97 52
6 Josh Worrell Adelaide 59 86 — —
7 Mason Redman Essendon 142 86 — —
8 Harris Andrews Brisbane Lions 240 85 87 41
9 Harry Himmelberg GWS 205 84 — —
10 Nick Vlastuin Richmond 252 84 — —

The right-hand column is the player’s overall KICK (the award-aligned number, unchanged). Note what the scaled KICK-D column does: Harris Andrews moves from 41 to 85 because the formula finally rewards what he does best — take intercept marks, rebound the ball, spoil contested marks. He’s the #8 active defender on form, not the #400-something player the overall KICK buries him at.

Jeremy McGovern (retired 2025, 190 games, career KICK-D 94) isn’t on the current list but tops the all-time defenders leaderboard behind Stewart and Sicily.

Top 5 ruckmen (KICK-R)

# Player Team Games KICK-R R40 Career KICK ref
1 Max Gawn Melbourne 249 100 100 71
2 Tristan Xerri North Melbourne 78 88 80 62
3 Tim English Western Bulldogs 158 82 82 62
4 Darcy Cameron Collingwood 122 82 — —
5 Brodie Grundy Sydney 245 81 88 67

Gawn is still Gawn. Xerri at #2 on R40 form is not a mistake — a 2024-2026 stretch of dominant ruck craft that the raw hit-out counts only partly capture.

Top 5 forwards (KICK-F)

# Player Team Games KICK-F R40 Career KICK ref
1 Isaac Heeney Sydney 224 100 88 60
2 Izak Rankine Adelaide — 87 — —
3 Jeremy Cameron GWS / Geelong 280 85 76 50
4 Sam Darcy Western Bulldogs 48 85 — —
5 Riley Thilthorpe Adelaide — 82 — —

Heeney at #1 forward on active form is the correct read of how Sydney have been using him since late 2024 — resting up the ground, impacting the scoreboard directly through goals and chain involvement. The overall KICK sees him as a 60 because he kicks fewer total goals than the Lockett/Dunstall archetype; KICK-F sees him as a 100 because score involvement per game is elite.

Top 5 midfielders (KICK-M)

# Player Team Games KICK-M R40 Career KICK ref
1 Marcus Bontempelli Western Bulldogs 262 100 100 73
2 Nick Daicos Collingwood 99 92 86 69
3 Caleb Serong Fremantle 132 89 — 66
4 Lachie Neale Brisbane Lions 291 89 — 69
5 Matt Rowell Gold Coast 110 88 — —

Midfielders barely move between overall KICK and KICK-M because the award-aligned overall formula already rewards them. That’s the position the rating was already getting right.

What this changes, and what it doesn’t

Overall KICK is still KICK. If you cite KICK in a tweet, it’s the headline number on the player profile. That number is unchanged. Bontempelli sits at 73. Harris Andrews sits at 41. Same as yesterday.

But you now have a second question you can ask. Not “who is the best player” but “who is the best at playing this position?”. That’s Positional KICK. Andrews is #8 active defender, McGovern #4 all-time, Tom Stewart #1. Fair reads of defenders being rated against each other rather than against midfielders.

Season and decade slices exist now too. Search “best AFL defender 2024” and we have a page for that — Luke Ryan topped it. “Best AFL forwards of the 2000s”? That page too — Riewoldt, Brad Johnson, Richardson, Lloyd, Pavlich.

Click any column header to re-sort. Every leaderboard on the site is now sortable by games, R40, career, or best-game. Small quality-of-life upgrade alongside the scaffolding rebuild.

And we’re not going to relitigate the overall rating. v1.1 stays. We’ll update it when new data genuinely reaches us, and we’ll label the version when we do.

The rating will always be imperfect. The honest thing is to show you how.

Where it falls short

Pre-2000 defenders and midfielders are structurally underweighted. AFL Tables stopped tracking rebound-50s, contested marks, one-percenters and some hit-out data progressively through the 1990s. The era normaliser lifts 1965–1999 scores, but it can’t invent missing data. Stephen Silvagni, Dustin Fletcher, Matthew Scarlett rank lower on the all-time defenders list than any subjective ranking would put them — their raw stat lines are thin because of when they played, not how they played. We’ve added a caveat banner on the all-time pages and we’ll keep thinking about this.

The classifier misses some hybrid players. 3,423 players are still classified as “Utility” because their career stat profile spans multiple roles — Shaun Burgoyne, Brent Harvey, long-career swingmen. They don’t appear on positional leaderboards because we couldn’t confidently bucket them.

Short careers sneak into the current leaderboards. A rookie defender with 30 games of hot form can outrank a 200-game veteran on the current list. That’s by design — current is about form, not legacy. If you want sustained excellence, the all-time tab is what you want.

Links

Questions, disagreements, or a player we got wrong? hello@kicker.au.