A good start to an AFL season has always been viewed as extremely important by all those in the football world.
Not only does allow a team to get some early, invaluable wins on the board, but it also instills belief within the players with the seemingly endless pre-season beginning to pay off.
There are a plethora of reasons why a club might not start the season off well. One could be a horror run of injuries, another could be tricky opposition and another could be that the playing system is still being tuned.
However, history has accentuated to us that an 0-3 start is extremely detrimental to a side's finals hopes.
Every team since 2012 (following the additions of expansion clubs GWS and Gold Coast) has theoretically started off a season with a 44.4% chance of making finals.
However, the chances of an 0-3 side making it into finals since the year 2012 are just 7% with just two out of 28 teams who have gone 0-3 making it into the top 8.
These two exceptions came in 2017 and 2021 when the two NSW sides, Sydney and GWS, respectively managed to salvage a poor start to the season and make an elimination final.
In both these cases, a lot had to go right in order to catapult their performance into the top eight. Sydney managed to win nine games in a row to earn their finals spot, while GWS managed to get plenty of their top talent back from injury for the latter part of the season.
For the sake of this experiment, we are going to leave out Carlton's 0-3 start in 2013 which resulted in a finals run following Essendon's withdrawal from the series.
It is also worth noting that no side has come back from 0-3 to make the top four, let alone win the Premiership.
Meanwhile, of all the 28 sides that went 0-3, 15 of them finished in the bottom four with most of the others finishing little higher.
With GWS and West Coast on the brink of an 0-3 start, their Round 3 games will be of huge significance.
While all these sides have been relatively unlucky, the Eagles have been decimated like no other as a club due to an unfortunate combination of injury and health and safety protocols and who, of all the teams, have the best reason for being 0-3.
As for the Bombers and Power, it will be incredibly difficult for them to rebound off a poor start to catapult towards the top eight or top four in the Power's case.
Both sides have had some injury woes which have made it difficult to click into gear.
However, the Bombers have the very valid excuse of playing three of the top four sides from last year to start their season.
As for the Power, they played two sides who finished in the bottom four, Hawthorn and Adelaide, at the Adelaide Oval. And with the reigning premiers and the surging Blues in the next two weeks, Ken Hinkley's side really needs to dig in and discover their long-lost form.
Otherwise, Hinkley will quickly find himself under pressure as the first coach to potentially be given the boot for the year.
