Coming into the night, the 2026 Brownlow Medal count held little intrigue about who the winner would be.
Few — if any — in the footballing world thought there was anyone who could seriously challenge Nick Daicos for the award.
But there was still one person who was in shock: Daicos, himself.
“I can’t believe I’m the Brownlow medallist to be honest,” Daicos said at the award ceremony in Melbourne.
The count was close until about the halfway mark, before Daicos pulled away from the pack as the season progressed.
With his 47 votes last night, Daicos has earned more votes in the last four years than any other player has in any five-year period.
Daicos earned more votes than three entire clubs. He collected 63 per cent of Collingwood’s votes for the evening.
He racked up record after record: the most votes in one year, most consecutive games with three votes (six), the most games with three votes (13).
It wasn’t just a win, it was domination.
With the win, Daicos joins Tom Mitchell, Gary Ablett Jr and Ben Cousins as father-son selections who have claimed the Brownlow Medal (Jobe Watson’s 2012 victory was rescinded).
Daicos time
Plenty has been written about what makes Daicos special.
Coaches and opposition players talk about his elusiveness, vision and ability to make something out of what seems like nothing.
And then there is his competitiveness.
“He hates losing,” Magpies great Scott Pendlebury said.
“Especially at table tennis. Whenever we travel on the road, he always tries to get a re-match.”
That competitive drive is often what turns good into great, and great into legendary.
But words pale into insignificance compared to watching the best of Daicos in full flight.
Players like Daicos stand out due to the highlights they create.
Teams spend more time trying to get Daicos off balance than any other player in the competition.
It hasn’t seemed to have an effect yet.
No matter what teams throw at Daicos, he still has an unerring habit of getting the ball and letting his imagination run wild.
That drive was forged from his early days as a player, often being one of the slightest on the field when he played up in age at both the Greythorn Falcons and the Kew Rovers.
When Daicos moved to Carey Grammar for year 10, he was thrust immediately into the first team to compete in the prestigious APS football competition.
His teammates were no slouches either, with Daicos playing alongside the likes of Noah Anderson and last year’s Brownlow medallist, Matt Rowell.
No player in the AFL was more important in getting his team in scoring positions than Daicos was this year.
Daicos thrived at winning the ball when no-one had clear control.
He has an innate ability to track the ball before anyone else, working smarter and not harder.
Daicos also has a scary ability to render his direct opponents as traffic cones.
The Magpies look to get Daicos the ball as much as possible, and he repays them with territory.
Few can match his combination of skill, speed and footy intelligence.
Although Collingwood fell short this year, hopes are higher for 2027 with additional reinforcements.
Family zone
Throughout football’s history, geography has shaped the make-up of teams to a great extent.
Teams recruited from specific regions. The fortunes of clubs rose and fell based on the growth of different geographic areas.
Urban expansion fuelled Hawthorn’s rise, while weak and depopulating zones condemned other clubs to near extinction.
There was one exception to the geography-based dictation of the footy landscape: the sons of former players.
The father-son rule was introduced in 1949 to ensure players such as Ron Barassi could continue on the legacy of their fathers at their clubs regardless of geography.
These days, the role of geography has inverted and it now dictates where all the father-son selections are.
The family zone for Victorian footy now runs through south-east Melbourne.
This was the former recruiting area for Hawthorn, otherwise known as the Family Club.
The ranks of father-son selections are littered with schools and clubs based in the most desirable parts of Melbourne, often far from the origins of their fathers’ careers.
For example, the Silvangi and Daicos offspring played their junior footy at the Greythorn Falcons.
That’s only a stone’s throw from Collingwood captain Darcy Moore’s junior club of Ivanhoe.
Nor is it far from where Mitchell or Watson first honed their craft.
The eastern side of Melbourne has increasingly become a powerhouse in junior footy as well, with Sandringham, Oakleigh and the Eastern Ranges dominating the AFL’s Talent League in recent seasons.
Brownlow’s changing face
A major change took place to the fabric of the Brownlow Medal this year.
Umpires gained access to a select group of 17 statistics before voting. Daicos excelled in several of these measures.
This may rob part of what made the Brownlow so special.
Umpires have a unique perspective. They’re also party to the intangibles, such as on-field demeanour, respect and sportsmanship.
This year’s votes aligned more closely to the results of the AFL Coaches Association award than ever before, according to Wheelo Ratings.
Coaches pore over key numbers throughout their games and now umpires can rely on some of the same figures to adjudge best afield as well.
Supplying data may condition umpires to discard insights gleaned in the heat of the action, turning them instead into just another spin on the same cold distant observations.
Defenders are already suffering even more than they traditionally do, while midfielders, who often accumulate high “count” stats, get a larger share of the spoils.
Rucks also outperformed their expected output this year, likely benefiting from the inclusion of hit-outs.
This will likely serve to further intensify a growing trend towards vote concentration in disposal-accumulating midfielders.
The leaderboard for career-long average votes is strewn liberally with current players, with previous leaders Haydn Bunton and Graham Moss only playing the prime vote-earning part of their careers in the VFL.
If this trend continues, Daicos will soon break Patrick Dangerfield and Ablett Jr’s record for most career votes, at least until the next star enters the scene.
But all of that is for the future.
All that is important now is that the inevitable ascension of Daicos to the pinnacle of the game has taken place.
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