AFL Round 22 2026 Team of the Week: Sydney's Jake Lloyd rated 203 and still couldn't find a jumper
The best eighteen games is the easy read — but this round the wall did more work than the ratings, and a top-five performance in the whole competition sat on the outside looking in.
The read
Everyone's going to lead with Kai Lohmann topping the round at 213, and they should — that's real, elite football, correctly credited. But the most interesting thing about this Team of the Week isn't a name on it. It's a name that couldn't get on it. Jake Lloyd rated 203 this round. That's a mark that would have been the single best performance of a normal week. He's listed first out.
Here's the diagnosis: this wasn't a ranking of eighteen good games so much as a funnel with a hard wall — eighteen jumpers — and this round the wall did more work than the ratings did. Sydney produced so much football that a top-five game in the entire competition couldn't find a spot. Two Swans made the team — Warner and Gulden — and four of the eight best players held out are also Swans. When a side spills that far over the edge of the page, the overflow is where the round's real depth is hiding.
The tempting misread is to see 'Lloyd missed the team' and file it as 'Lloyd had a quieter week.' The opposite is true. His 203 is identical to Chad Warner's 203 — and Warner's in, Lloyd's out. Same number, opposite outcome, and the whole difference is which queue they were standing in. Warner's a midfielder in a deep, competitive spot; Lloyd's a rebounding defender who ran into a back-six that all fired at once — Josh Daicos, Bowey, McCarthy, Daniel. He didn't fall short. The line moved in front of him.
The round itself explains the crush. A normal week produces about four games past 200; this one produced five, and thirty-one past 150. That's a high tide across the whole competition, and it means the bar moved — which is why a game that tops a normal round finished nowhere near a jumper here. It also flips how you should read the quiet numbers. The selected team averages 167, actually lower than the round's eighteen best at 188, because the flying small forwards and wingers were the loud engine — Lohmann 213, Rankine 204, Warner 203, McStay 210 — and the key backs and ruck sit below them by role. Which makes Harris Andrews at 135, Petty at 97 and Pittonet at 111 more impressive, not less: they held standard at the unglamorous end while the round ran hot around them, doing their best work in exactly the conditions built to bury their positions.
Brisbane are the other readable shape. Lohmann and Morris up forward, Andrews anchoring the other end — the Lions are all over the team. But look at the held-out list again: Will Ashcroft (169) and Lachie Neale (167) are both there, both first out, both with genuinely strong rounds. That's not a knock — it's a picture of how a team's afternoon was built. Brisbane's round pooled in the forward half so heavily that good midfield games from marquee names couldn't crack the eighteen. A side whose best work concentrates in one third of the ground is a specific, readable thing.
The honest counter deserves its due: maybe there's no hidden story at all — maybe this is just a genuinely deep round, the team is simply the eighteen best, and the held-out names are the plain arithmetic of only owning eighteen jumpers. That read is fair, and partly right. But notice what it concedes rather than defeats: a normal week's best performance sitting outside the team is itself the finding. The overflow doesn't undermine the eighteen. It measures how much football there was to fit.
What the evidence carries: the ratings, the round records, the held-out list, and a selection wall that priced two identical 203s in opposite directions this week. What it doesn't carry is any trend — no prior form, no trajectory. Whether Lloyd walks straight in next week the moment the back-six ahead of him has a quieter day, or whether Brisbane's forward-heavy shape is how they're built rather than a one-week snapshot, isn't something a single round can tell you. It's a shape worth watching. Which of these teams — the eighteen who fit, or the near-eighteen who didn't — you think tells you more about the round is yours to weigh.
Who ran out of jumpers
The measure of how big the round was isn't the eighteen who made it — it's the players who produced genuine Team-of-the-Week football and still missed.
Jake Lloyd Sydney Swans203- Logan McDonald Sydney Swans189
Max Hall St Kilda188- Charlie Curnow Sydney Swans181
Paul Curtis North Melbourne171
Will Ashcroft Brisbane Lions169
This was a fast, high-scoring round won out wide and in the forward pockets, and the Team of the Week is really two teams stacked on top of each other — the eighteen who fit, and the near-eighteen who didn't. The understanding isn't in who got picked. It's in the overflow: Sydney had an afternoon so big that a game good enough to top a normal round couldn't fit on the page.