For as long as Sam Mitchell is the coach of the Hawthorn Football Club, the obvious comparisons will be made with Michael Voss, James Hird and Nathan Buckley, who like Mitchell were Brownlow medallists, premiership players and premiership captains of their football clubs before being elevated into the senior coaching positions at those same clubs.
And because results are really all that matter when it comes to coaching, that’s where the comparisons will start and end.
But what can be said with absolute certainty is that Mitchell will the most prepared and the most ready of that quartet when his time comes.
Neither Voss or Hird spent even one day as an assistant coach before being appointed at Brisbane and Essendon. Both worked in the media and Hird was a partner at sports consultancy GEMBA. Buckley coached at the AIS and worked in the media before two years under Mick Malthouse as an assistant.
Mitchell has spent years planning his pathway to AFL senior coaching, with the likes of Hawks legend David Parkin as a mentor. In addition to the various AFL coaching programs, there have been trips to various sporting clubs overseas. He is a football savant.
But there were two imperatives for Mitchell. Two boxes that needed to be ticked. The first was that he leave Hawthorn and experience life at another club. The deal to go to West Coast to work under Adam Simpson had been in the wings for a few years but was fast-tracked to include a year as a player when Alastair Clarkson wanted to freshen the Hawks playing list at the end of 2016.
Of course, Mitchell was supposed to spend longer than the two years he did with the Eagles – one as a player and the other as coach – but he earned rave reviews for his work as the midfield coach in the 2018 premiership year.
The other key requirement for Mitchell was to coach a team in his own right. Buckley dabbled in it, but neither Voss nor Hird had that on their post-playing resumes. Clarkson had done it with Werribee and Central Districts en route to Hawthorn (via Port Adelaide) and appointing Mitchell as Box Hill coach this year was all part of the plan.
In addition to that role, Mitchell is also serving as Hawthorn’s head of development and it was quite the savvy move by the club. Every player brought to the Hawks in a period where they are hitting the draft hard will be developed by Mitchell and taught the way he wants them to play before he becomes the senior coach.
The Mick Malthouse to Buckley succession plan never really worked at Collingwood because a) Malthouse never wanted to relinquish the coaching job in the first place and b) the Pies won the flag in 2010 and made the Grand Final the following year. It could only go downhill from there.
Paul Roos to John Longmire at Sydney, and Roos to Simon Goodwin at Melbourne are coaching handovers that shape as more successful that what we saw at Collingwood, but if we dive back into history a bit further, what’s happening at Hawthorn is not unlike what happened at North Melbourne more than 30 years ago, when after coaching the under 19s to a several premierships, Denis Pagan took over as senior coach at the Kangaroos in 1993 and made the finals in nine of the following 10 seasons, including two premierships. Many of those he coached in the under 19s were key members of his senior teams at North, Clarkson among them.
We won’t know for some time whether Mitchell can coach. What we do know is that he has given himself every chance to demonstrate that he can.