AFL Round 23 2026 Team of the Week: why the round's best game — Mitch Owens' — isn't in it

The read

Here is the thing nobody points at when the eighteen go up: the best game of the round isn't among them. Mitch Owens played it — a contribution rating of 213, higher than every single player who got a jumper — and he is the first man left out. Not the fortieth. The first. That's not a mistake to be corrected; it's the whole point of how this honour actually works, and it's more interesting than any name on the list.

The diagnosis is simple once you see it. The Team of the Week doesn't crown the eighteen best games — it crowns the best game in each spot. And this week the small and medium forwards all fired at once: four separate elite games funnelled through Owens' part of the ground. So the man who played the round's finest game watched from outside, beaten not by anyone's numbers but by the geometry of where he plays. The badge and the best game came apart. That seam is the story.

Look where the round was really won and it's not through the middle. The number everyone will quote — the top score in the selected side, a 210 — belongs to a rebound half-back. Add another running defender at 166 and a third at 161 across the back, and the least-celebrated line in football out-produced the famous on-ballers. And they were famous: a 194, a 203, a 192 from the midfield engine room, games anyone would build a side around. But the round-topping jumper came from behind the ball. The advantage was manufactured deep and carried forward — which the tidy 'midfield dominance' take walks straight past.

This was a deep round, not a top-heavy one. Twenty-eight players cleared 150; only three got past 200, against the four-or-so a normal round produces. Fewer freakish games, far more very good ones. That's why the cut was so unforgiving — 213 not enough — and why the story is spread across the ground rather than parked on two names. When the round's character is breadth, 'who was best' is the wrong question to ask of it.

The best example of that breadth is Melbourne. Six genuinely strong games in one week — and the side had room for two of them. That's not two players carrying a club; that's a club so even across the ground that its own depth split the vote. It's one of the better collective weeks you'll see get so little to show for it. Fair warning on the limit, though: that's one round. A club that spreads six strong games across a week is either humming toward something or caught a soft one, and a single week can't tell you which. Take it as a big week, not a proven peak.

So honour the eighteen — they earned it, and the straight take that the selected top score is a legitimate round-topper is completely defensible. Then sit with the layer underneath: the process quietly told a richer story than the result. The best game of the round is outside the side, the round-topping jumper is a defender, and a club had its best week of the year for two badges. One caution before you weigh it — these ratings are set against each position's own standard, so a defender's number and a forward's aren't the same currency; don't read them off against each other. What the evidence carries is what this one round looked like. Whether it's the shape of the run home is yours to decide.

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.

• 
  Mitch Owens St Kilda
  213
• 
  Jy Simpkin North Melbourne
  189
• 
  Caleb Windsor Melbourne
  174
• 
  Bailey Laurie Melbourne
  173
• 
  Oliver Dempsey Geelong Cats
  172
• 
  Bayley Fritsch Melbourne
  168