AFL Scraps 2027 Opening Round as Jezza Admits He Nearly "Hung Them Up" and Walked Away

No scores. No ladders. No post-match press conferences where a coach explains the "little things." The last 24 hours in Australian rules football belonged to the stories between the games—and three of them landed with real weight.

The Opening Round Won't Be Coming Back

The AFL has confirmed it will abandon the Opening Round for the 2027 season, per ABC News. For a format that was sold as a way to get every club on the field before the regular round proper, the decision signals a league that has looked at the calendar, the travel load, and the competitive integrity of a "pre-season" round and decided the cost outweighs the spectacle.

It's not a dramatic restructuring. Nobody's losing a division or a premiership spot. But the Opening Round had become a fixture of the pre-season narrative—those two weeks of "everyone plays everyone" that let fans get their first fix of the new season before the real ladder started grinding. Scrapping it for 2027 means the build-up to Round 1 gets a little longer, a little quieter, and a little more dependent on training-camp buzz and draft-night echoes to carry the hype.

For clubs that used the extra two games as a genuine competitive barometer, the loss is more tangible. For the league office, it's a calendar simplification. Both things can be true at once.

"I'd Probably Hang Them Up"

The most human story of the cycle came from the AFL's own site, where a player going by the nickname Jezza opened up about how close he came to walking away from the game entirely. The headline quote—"I'd probably hang them up"—is the kind of line that tells you the decision wasn't a boardroom conversation or a single bad season. It was a slow, private erosion of the thing that kept him lacing up.

Without the full context of what pushed him to that edge, the confession still lands because it reframes the career narrative. We tend to talk about AFL careers in terms of stats, selections, and contract years. Jezza's story is the other half: the Tuesday night you sit in the car in the parking lot and seriously consider not walking back in. The fact that he's still here, still playing, is the actual news. The near-exit is the context that makes every subsequent game a little more earned.

The Punt That Crossed the Pacific

Nine.com.au ran a piece on an Australian-born NFL star whose punt technique was, in the article's framing, "borrowed from the AFL," and the result was enough to stun American football audiences. The crossover angle is the hook—Aussie rules football's kicking mechanics, with its emphasis on the drop and the follow-through, finding a direct application in American football's most underappreciated position.

It's a small story in the grand scheme of two different codes sharing a continent's sporting DNA, but it's the kind of piece that reminds you the AFL's skill set isn't just a local curiosity. A punt that looks "wrong" to an American eye because it was built on 200 metres of oval grass and a different ball is, to the person executing it, just Tuesday.

What's Next

The calendar picks back up with Geelong hosting Sydney on Wednesday, Western Bulldogs meeting Fremantle on Thursday, and a back-to-back Friday featuring Brisbane at home to Hawthorn and Carlton taking on Richmond in the evening slot. No Opening Round drama to colour those fixtures. Just the regular round, starting to find its rhythm.

And somewhere in a training shed, a player who almost hung them up is lacing back in. That's the league in a nutshell.