GEORGIE PARKER: Adelaide Crows exceeded all expectations so season is not a failure despite AFL finals losses

What does a successful season in footy look like?

Often success is usually measured in its simplest form: the premiership.

One team ends the year holding the cup, and everyone else has fallen short. But when you zoom in on the individual journeys of clubs, the barometer of a successful year is far more complex.

Take the Adelaide Crows for example. By the time their season ended in a straight-sets finals exit on Friday night, there was plenty of commentary that they had failed and were chokers.

They couldn’t handle finals pressure because on paper, a side finishing top of the ladder and crashing out in two weeks looks like an underachievement.

It had never happened in the AFL era and the Crows were also the first minor premiers to lose to the eighth-placed side.

But, context matters when delving in to conversation of what is success.

The Crows, who finished 15th just a year ago, surged to the top of the ladder this season. Their meteoric rise was so unlikely that if you’d asked any pundit (and us Crows fans) in March if it were possible, they would’ve laughed it off.

So they found themselves on top of the ladder, but were they the dominant side of the season or were they a side who kept their list the healthiest and capitalised on others stumbling by seasons end?

Collingwood were so far ahead mid-season they decided to train so hard and manage players they lost games they shouldn’t have.

Brisbane had the back end of their season severely impacted by injuries and the Cats played no one of significance heading into the finals.

The Crows’ finals performance may not have lived up to the minor premiers label, but that’s partly because they were lucky in a way to be minor premiers and probably wasn’t where they belonged to finish.

It’s hard to imagine how any club, jumping from 15th to first (be it a soft first or not) in a year, could be judged harshly.

In fact, the weight of expectation that came with their ladder position probably distorted how the campaign will be remembered.

Had the Crows finished fifth, maybe winning a final was on their cards to begin with, then losing the semifinal doesn’t seem so bad.

Unlike the established heavy-hitter contenders — Collingwood, Geelong and Brisbane — who measure success only by grand finals, Adelaide’s rise should be seen as a step forward, not a collapse.

Contrast that with Gold Coast. The Suns won just a single final, yet the mood around their season was overwhelmingly positive.

For a club that has battled for relevance, even a taste of September success was enough to validate the year. For them, it wasn’t about where they finished, but about progress, momentum and showing their supporters a glimpse of what might be possible.

So, what is the true measure of success or failure? It can’t simply be the premiership, or else we dismiss the growth that happened along the way.

A club’s trajectory matters just as much as its win-loss column. The same goes for teams who miss finals — sometimes it’s not an automatic fail.

Adelaide’s 2025 story did not end in a premiership cup, or even a finals win, but what their on-field performance showed throughout the season — from where they were a year ago — is that it should be considered a success.

This year has set a higher bar of where we will measure their success next year, and that’s when the real challenge comes.