The prospect of a mid-season trade period has been described among the top brass at AFL headquarters as Gillon McLachlan's "captain's call".
And while the league chief's proposal to allow clubs to draft in players from other clubs over a set period in June each year has not proved quite so unpopular as Tony Abbott's decision to knight Prince Philip, it appears to have come close.
McLachlan is understood to have thrown open the topic to the 18 AFL club chiefs over their two-day meeting this week and been met with virtual silence. Only Carlton CEO Steven Trigg spoke of the radical idea as having some merit but it was a short conversation.
And yet McLachlan is pressing ahead with a logistical investigation into a mid-season draft. Although the AFL has scrapped any prospect of it taking place next year McLachlan's key lieutenants Mark Evans and Andrew Dillon are looking at how it could work in the future, along with a number of other evolving list-management issues.
Club football bosses, list managers and recruiters have been similarly underwhelmed at the prospect. Their biggest issue, which apparently left the AFL boss cold, was that list management is a science — or even an art — that clubs should work at to the best of their abilities without the extra flexibility to bring in specific top-up players mid-season.
The other objections focused on the complexities of moving players from club to club mid-season — for example, whether it would be possible to trade a player for a draft pick and how the new flexibility would affect the salary cap.
Even the players seem underwhelmed by what could prove an opportunity for some to cross to a team with finals prospects from a side which cannot necessarily offer a regular senior place. The AFL Players Association has not taken a position on the mid-season trade period but few playing groups supported the idea during the most recent club visits.
A number of case studies have been put forward by McLachlan, including West Coast's scare early last season when the Eagles' key backmen incurred a series of injuries and more pertinently this year when Port Adelaide lost Matthew Lobbe through a combination of injury and poor form after Paddy Ryder was suspended for a season.
As it eventuated, Jackson Trengove stepped up but under the McLachlan scenario, St Kilda could have capitalised by trading Billy Longer or Lewis Pierce and in a seller's market reaped significant rewards either through a future draft pick or a required player.
While the club football chiefs have argued that a mid-season trade period would only further benefit the stronger clubs in contention for September, McLachlan has argued the opposite. That a June transaction would place the weaker clubs in a stronger bargaining position than at the end of the season and therefore help to some degree by bridging the gap between the rich and poor clubs.
American football fans point out that the New England Patriots, after a perfect 8-0 start to the last NFL season, could not have reached the finals without a characteristically active mid-year trade period after the team's wide receivers fell like dominoes to injury.
And yet AFL clubs rightly fear that a new flexible rule could be exploited by zealous list managers looking for loopholes to expand their lists. And the salary cap complications, along with how draft pick trades would work, have been deemed a potential minefield. Just how supporters would cope with player movement mid-season, which has not taken place since 1993, poses another potential issue.
Whether you believe in the luck of the draw and putting faith in good management or prefer a new mechanism to shake up what for many clubs can loom as a long, dismal winter — not to mention provide opportunities for players languishing in the reserves — there is definitely some show-business appeal to McLachlan's scheme. McLachlan seems to have accepted he has few strong supporters.
Even football boss Evans reportedly saw no real merit in working to bring forward the idea. But given that the boss continues to publicly extol the proposal, undeterred by the numbers against him, the AFL will continue to explore a late June trade period which could last about two weeks.
For next year however, the idea has been removed from the table.