Over the last few months, I've been watching all of our home and away wins last year.
Re-watching a large batch of games like that is something I would never normally do.
My take ... I had forgotten how scarily good we were once the injuries stopped.
And even having the injuries in the first place was a big part of the reason we got so good ... it gave extra opportunities to players like Stack, Ross, Balta, Chol and even Soldo. Most of these players took these opportunities and the competition for spots in the team sky-rocketed.
Originally I watched all of these games live as they happened and with the stress of not knowing the resulting and "barracking" for us to win removed, it really is very obvious how good we were.
I think that the only thing that kept a lot of the games relatively close (even when the injured players had returned) was a supreme belief among the players that we were that much better and would turn it on when it was needed. And we did. In most games there are stunning moments of individual brilliance.
I am also still a firm believer that the coaching staff deliberately resource-managed the team to the extent that we only win by as much as we needed to to secure the points and not to waste energy on chasing percentage, which they had probably given up on when it slumped to 92.0 by Round 14.
After that, with the exception of flogging Gold Coast by 92 points and clinching the match-of-the-year against West Coast by 6, our winning margins were 33, 27, 38, 32, 33, 28 and 27 - and in that lot there were teams as good as Collingwood, GWS and Brisbane and as bad as Carlton and Melbourne. It didn't matter who we were playing, we would make sure we won and won comfortably but no more than that.
The only things that made us look anything remotely touchable were the game against West Coast and the first half of the Preliminary Final.
After going five consecutive weeks without gaining a premiership point, I reckon from Round 15 on, for three months, we were as dominant as any team in recent memory and the Grand Final flogging was no anomaly and even against more fancied oppostion (e.g. Collingwood, Geelong, West Coast), we would have won comfortably.