Entering another season, the AFL's appetite for change grows ever more ravenous.

History is bunk. Tradition is a barrier to progress. Sentiment clouds judgement.

Imperfection must be identified. Every wrinkle must be ironed out. Australian Rules must defy the physics of sport. It must be a game without fault or foible.

Actually — there's a tasty morsel of change! — perhaps we should not call it Australian Rules.

Surely that hokey title is a throwback to the days before athletes were tested in laboratories, rule changes presented to focus groups and club uniform dictated by sponsors.

Let's call it AFL! All the better for marketing in those vital northern states.

Never mind suburban and country teams playing a game of Australian Football League is as absurd as park cricketers playing a game of International Cricket Council.

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Don't worry that calling Australian Rules "AFL" creates the impression the top tier is the game's only purpose and those at the base of the pyramid are merely there to serve the elite.

Once the media might have called out such change-by-stealth, but we've had our own significant name change. The rights-holding media is not the old free press.

So not only will those spinning the game's relentless 24-hour news wheel ignore this ludicrous re-branding, they will drive the change.

They know how this game works: When something doesn't seem perfect change is no longer the last resort, it is the first.

So if you can identify a problem — or something that someone perceives to be a problem — you can fill those endless hours of on-air discussion and talk-back with once-ludicrous suggestions.

It's unclear whether AFLX's replacement of the coin toss with a game of rock, paper, scissors will return in 2020. ( AAP: Daniel Pockett )

"Is Carlton's navy blue guernsey too blue? Ring 1800-AFLAllTheTime. First three callers win a cured ham and 2,000 tickets to the AFLX."

The relationship between the AFL — the league, not the game — and the most servile elements of the media is symbiotic.

The AFL invites scrutiny of every aspect of its game through its obsession with change; or in the recent case of the non-twilight grand final, by merely hinting at change.

Several years ago the AFL produced a manifesto in which it listed the basic principles of the game. They did not include zones. Yet, this season, zones we have.

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Thus nothing seems off limits. So when the content-hungry media speculates about making the goal posts orange or the ball rectangular they can do so straight-faced.

The AFL has put everything from the integrity of the club colours to the starting positions during games themselves on the table.

How does a game justify such rapid change when it considers itself to be the planet's greatest secret — the game that would have taken the world by storm if it, not football, had been exported by the English explorers?

There is that delusion of possible perfection; the self-defeating notion that warts and quirks can be eradicated by statute without diminishing the charm that made the game great.

"You stand here, you stand here and you stand here. Right, now the game will be just like it was when players went where their experience and instinct told them where to go. Got it?"

This is the decision-making of a competition that worships at the altar of change so devoutly that it seems blind to consequences.

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Stand in those zones; don't sneeze near the player granted a 50-metre penalty. And if a player twitches at a vital stage in a game and the contest is decided by a technical infringement?

The outrage of the fans will be drowned out by the most pliable commentators victim-blaming players: "He should have known the rule by now!"

Never mind the rule is in contravention of 150 years of collective learning, instinct and muscle memory.

But in the AFL change is cool with those self-styled young progressives who can't remember a time when a season started without some significant alteration to the rules.

"So if you had it your way the captains would still be calling the free kicks and there would be no centre square," they sniff, mistaking the game's slow evolution for the current panic-stricken alteration craze.

A few months ago the same change junkies might have advocated some version of the conference system. After all, "it works in American sports".

Yet conferences worked so well in the AFLW (now routinely disrespected as a laboratory for AFL rule tinkering) that the first-, second-, fifth- and sixth-best teams will contest the finals.

Yet again the benefit was considered and the consequence ignored until it was too late because action was mistaken for progress.

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For all that there is a lot to love about the impending AFL season.

The adoption of US-style salary caps and a draft system were radical solutions that have been allowed to bed down and create a competition pregnant with possibility.

That you can make a case for seven or eight teams to win this season's premiership is pleasing and exciting — even as the tinkerers suggest more changes to free-agency rules that would weaken the salary cap/draft system.

And therein lies the problem with the AFL — or at least the way it is projected, analysed and administered.

The only thing we know for certain this season is that no matter how good the game is, it won't be good enough.