AFL 2025 Round 4: Heroes and Zeros

Round 4 was a pretty good round of footy, with a couple of cracking contests. I managed to catch a handful of matches, and it was mostly the non-Victorian teams providing the highlights—Suns v Crows and Dockers v Bulldogs were my two favourites.

In fact, the latter featured the top two performances of the weekend based on AFL Player Ratings, with both Caleb Serong and Sam Darcy (again!) taking out the top spots (explainer on player ratings).

At the other end of the scale, Brodie Kemp from Carlton posted the lowest rating of the round: -6.0 player rating points in the Blues' heavy loss to their perennial rivals, Collingwood.

Here’s the latest instalment in my blog series examining the best and worst performers from each round of footy, based on AFL Player Ratings.

I've previously covered the rough methodology behind these posts, but after some back and forth over on the AFL subreddit, I’ve adjusted the minimum game time threshold—from 50% down to 25%—for inclusion in the data.

Most players rated between 5 and 10 points in Round 4, but there were some notable outliers—both high and low—including a handful of negative ratings.

Freo 'heroes' once again take out top spot

Maybe Caleb Serong read my article last week (where I said Luke Jackson probably deserved the Glendinning-Allan Medal), because he came out and tore the league a new one—best on ground and best of the round, with a rating of 29.3, a full 4.3 points higher than opponent Sam Darcy.

Serong finished with 38 disposals, 15 clearances, and 24 contested possessions. Those are epically good numbers.

The aforementioned Sam Darcy continues to prove himself as maybe the most valuable key forward in the game right now. Five goals kept the Dogs in it against Freo, but he also gathered 20 disposals and had a few hitouts. He’s arguably the preeminent tall in the league, impacting the scoreboard in multiple ways.

Elsewhere in the top 5:

• Lachie Ash (24.5 pts): 31 disposals, leaning heavily on 22 uncontested possessions, plus four rebound 50s in the Giants’ thrashing of West Coast.
• Jesse Hogan (24.0 pts): Hard to kick 9 goals and not be one of the round’s best.
• Darcy Jones (23.7 pts): A well-rounded game with 24 disposals, 2 goals, 6 inside 50s, and 7 tackles.

A bad day for Brody/ies

As a neutral, I have to admit I didn’t enjoy the Carlton v Collingwood game way back on Thursday night—especially compared to what followed. So it wasn’t surprising to see a few players from that match pop up at the bottom of the ratings.

Brodie Kemp probably had a round to forget—just 7 disposals, only 1 contested, despite playing 87% game time. It’s a steep drop from his excellent game the week before against the Bulldogs.

The other struggling Brody, Brody Mihocek, had 7 disposals (all kicks) at just 30% efficiency—meaning most of them didn’t move the needle for Collingwood. Add to that 3 behinds and no goals, and yeah, that’s going to get punished in the player rating formula.

Other poor performers included:

• Will White (-1.3 pts): 10 disposals, no tackles, and 3 behinds—inefficient and low-impact.
• Aaron Cadman (-0.9 pts): Just 1 goal, 3 behinds, and 8 disposals—not ideal when Hogan’s going off next to you.
• Nathan O'Driscoll (-0.8 pts): Unlucky here—he was injured in the third quarter and didn’t finish the game. But even before then, just 12 disposals, 3 marks, and 1 tackle made for a tough outing.

Anyway, that’s it for this round! If you made it this far—thank you for reading. If you were wondering about the full list of player ratings, I recommend having a read of the relevant round on Wheelo Ratings, a great place to get more in-depth AFL statistics.

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