{"id":900579,"date":"2026-09-21T22:26:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T22:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/900579\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T22:26:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T22:26:13","slug":"banned-swans-player-isaac-heeney-falls-short-in-brownlow-medal-vote-as-nick-daicos-wins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/900579\/","title":{"rendered":"Banned Swans player Isaac Heeney falls short in Brownlow Medal vote as Nick Daicos wins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tell us about your experience. <\/p>\n

The AFL has avoided the unwanted scenario of one of Sydney’s suspended players winning the Brownlow Medal, with Isaac Heeney finishing outside the count’s top five.<\/p>\n

The league had a contingency plan in place if Heeney had won the game’s highest individual honour.<\/p>\n

But Nick Daicos’s record-breaking number of votes<\/a>, and prolific polling from Bailey Smith and Marcus Bontempelli, meant the plan never needed to come into play.<\/p>\n

Daicos wins first Brownlow<\/a><\/p>\n

Nick Daicos breaks Patrick Cripps’s record in the 3-2-1 voting era by winning the first Brownlow Medal of his career.<\/p>\n

Heeney, and Swans teammates Chad Warner and Nick Blakey were among the notable absences from Monday night’s awards ceremony.<\/p>\n

Along with Riley Bice and James Jordon, they have been absent from Sydney’s headquarters since being suspended by the club in August.<\/p>\n

The five were stood down for breaching club standards following a post-match incident at the Pullman Hotel in East Melbourne.<\/p>\n

Those suspensions are separate to a police investigation into sexual assault allegations, with Victoria Police flagging an update is not expected until late October.<\/p>\n

No charges have been laid and the ABC is not suggesting any wrongdoing on the part of the five suspended players.<\/p>\n

Daicos rewrites history with Brownlow win<\/a><\/p>\n

Nick Daicos’s stardom has always had an inevitability to it, and his maiden Brownlow Medal triumph is the latest example of him fulfilling his immense promise.<\/p>\n

The five players were ruled ineligible for All-Australian honours and were not invited to the Brownlow Medal function in Melbourne.<\/p>\n

\u00a0But they remained eligible for the award.<\/p>\n

Brodie Grundy, Charlie Curnow, Dane Rampe, Logan McDonald and Tom McCartin were among those on hand for the Swans.<\/p>\n

Once the count started, Heeney was the only player considered a genuine contender.<\/p>\n

Heeney did not poll until round four, when he landed two votes, and claimed three votes against Gold Coast in Gather Round.<\/p>\n

Warner polled for the first time in round four, while Blakey claimed three votes in round six.<\/p>\n

Heeney claimed three consecutive three-vote performances to rise into the top four of the count at one point.<\/p>\n

But his best performances were not enough to come close to Daicos’s record-setting mark of 47 votes.<\/p>\n

Heeney finished equal-eighth on 26 votes, ahead of teammate Errol Gulden (17), who ended the season with five consecutive best-afield performances.<\/p>\n

AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tell us about your experience. The AFL has avoided the unwanted scenario of one of Sydney’s suspended players…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":900580,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,70772,275410,3487,14016,61822,469253,17728,93778,85,7200,25026],"class_list":["post-900579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-brownlow-medal","tag-count","tag-isaac-heeney","tag-marcus-bontempelli","tag-nick-daicos","tag-nicke-blakely","tag-police-investigation","tag-pullman-hotel","tag-sports","tag-sydney-swans","tag-vote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=900579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/900580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}