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 w

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