{"id":900847,"date":"2026-09-22T03:44:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T03:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/900847\/"},"modified":"2026-09-22T03:44:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T03:44:10","slug":"how-nick-daicos-won-the-2026-brownlow-medal-as-the-afls-best-and-fairest-player","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/900847\/","title":{"rendered":"How Nick Daicos won the 2026 Brownlow Medal as the AFL’s best and fairest player"},"content":{"rendered":"

Coming into the night, the 2026 Brownlow Medal count held little intrigue about who the winner would be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Few \u2014 if any \u2014 in the footballing world thought there was anyone who could seriously challenge Nick Daicos for the award.<\/p>\n

But there was still one person who was in shock: Daicos, himself.<\/p>\n

“I can’t believe I’m the Brownlow medallist to be honest,” Daicos said at the award ceremony in Melbourne.<\/p>\n

The count was close until about the halfway mark, before Daicos pulled away from the pack as the season progressed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Daicos earned more votes than three entire clubs. He collected 63 per cent of Collingwood’s votes for the evening.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

It wasn’t just a win, it was domination.<\/p>\n

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Ablett Jr and Ben Cousins as father-son selections who have claimed the Brownlow Medal (Jobe Watson’s 2012 victory was rescinded).<\/p>\n

Daicos time<\/p>\n

Plenty has been written about what makes Daicos special.<\/p>\n

Coaches and opposition players talk about his elusiveness, vision and ability to make something out of what seems like nothing.<\/p>\n

And then there is his competitiveness.<\/p>\n

“He hates losing,” Magpies great Scott Pendlebury said.<\/p>\n

“Especially at table tennis. Whenever we travel on the road, he always tries to get a re-match.”<\/p>\n

That competitive drive is often what turns good into great, and great into legendary.<\/p>\n

But words pale into insignificance compared to watching the best of Daicos in full flight.<\/p>\n

Players like Daicos stand out due to the highlights they create.<\/p>\n

Teams spend more time trying to get Daicos off balance than any other player in the competition.<\/p>\n

It hasn’t seemed to have an effect yet.<\/p>\n

No matter what teams throw at Daicos, he still has an unerring habit of getting the ball and letting his imagination run wild.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

His teammates were no slouches either, with Daicos playing alongside the likes of Noah Anderson and last year’s Brownlow medallist, Matt Rowell.<\/p>\n

No player in the AFL was more important in getting his team in scoring positions than Daicos was this year.<\/p>\n

Daicos thrived at winning the ball when no-one had clear control.<\/p>\n

He has an innate ability to track the ball before anyone else, working smarter and not harder.<\/p>\n

Daicos also has a scary ability to render his direct opponents as traffic cones.<\/p>\n

The Magpies look to get Daicos the ball as much as possible, and he repays them with territory.<\/p>\n

Few can match his combination of skill, speed and footy intelligence.<\/p>\n

Although Collingwood fell short this year, hopes are higher for 2027 with additional reinforcements.<\/p>\n

Family zone<\/p>\n

Throughout football’s history, geography has shaped the make-up of teams to a great extent.<\/p>\n

Teams recruited from specific regions. The fortunes of clubs rose and fell based on the growth of different geographic areas.<\/p>\n

Urban expansion fuelled Hawthorn’s rise, while weak and depopulating zones condemned other clubs to near extinction.<\/p>\n

There was one exception to the geography-based dictation of the footy landscape: the sons of former players.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These days, the role of geography has inverted and it now dictates where all the father-son selections are.<\/p>\n

The family zone for Victorian footy now runs through south-east Melbourne.<\/p>\n

This was the former recruiting area for Hawthorn, otherwise known as the Family Club.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For example, the Silvangi and Daicos offspring played their junior footy at the Greythorn Falcons.<\/p>\n

That’s only a stone’s throw from Collingwood captain Darcy Moore’s junior club of Ivanhoe.<\/p>\n

Nor is it far from where Mitchell or Watson first honed their craft.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Brownlow’s changing face<\/p>\n

A major change took place to the fabric of the Brownlow Medal this year.<\/p>\n

Umpires gained access to a select group of 17 statistics before voting. Daicos excelled in several of these measures.<\/p>\n

This may rob part of what made the Brownlow so special.<\/p>\n

Umpires have a unique perspective. They’re also party to the intangibles, such as on-field demeanour, respect and sportsmanship.<\/p>\n

This year’s votes aligned more closely to the results of the AFL Coaches Association award than ever before, according to Wheelo Ratings.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Rucks also outperformed their expected output this year, likely benefiting from the inclusion of hit-outs.<\/p>\n

This will likely serve to further intensify a growing trend towards vote concentration in disposal-accumulating midfielders.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But all of that is for the future.<\/p>\n

All that is important now is that the inevitable ascension of Daicos to the pinnacle of the game has taken place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Coming into the night, the 2026 Brownlow Medal count held little intrigue about who the winner would be.\u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":900848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[10968,638,64,63,55,639,70772,10990,275410,24705,61822,85],"class_list":["post-900847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-10968","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-brownlow-medal","tag-collingwood","tag-count","tag-magpies","tag-nick-daicos","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900847","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=900847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/900848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}