There's just as much risk on Kelly too. If he hates Freo and doesn't want to play for us, who knows how much effort he'll put in for us. Who knows how he'll go in a weaker midfield where he'll cop some attention. Who knows if we have a role for him or if the system at Geelong is the reason he had a big impact in the first half of the year. Who knows if he'll cop an injury. Or if a big long contract will have him sit back and count his money rather than continue to work hard on his game. There's risk everywhere.
I'm sure you can see the difference in the game and draft 20 years ago to now. Not only has technology advanced dramatically, there are far more scouts who are being paid far more money with actual full time jobs at this sort of thing. They have access to huge teams all over Australia with footage available at almost every level to analyse each kids games to a huge degree.
It's far easier to traverse the country and talk to these kids, their families, their friends, their teachers and their next door neighbour. They have social media and far more of an online footprint to research players characters and interests outside of footy along with mass interviews throughout the years long process as they develop. There are that many academies both at national, state and club level with experts providing help and opinons on players, it's pushing the ridiculous level. They're followed from a very young age and clubs will know everything about the vast majority of players well ahead of time.
It's very misleading to insinuate the draft is a lottery or relatively close to that in modern times. It's a science these days and the majority of top picks, will be good players if not superstars. As more information is made available, those chances increase. A top pick these days is far more valuable than 20 years ago when there were far more unknowns and uncertainties. Treating the draft like it was 20+ years ago is a mistake, it should be where we build the spine of our side from.
As for topping up to compliment Fyfe before he fades, the time to do that was after 2015/16/17 when we went the top up option with mid tier players and threw away a lot of draft picks. At this point, adding Kelly to Fyfe while losing Hill and Langdon does nothing for our improvement, especially when we don't have the kids underneath that driving the improvement.
