Brad Scott’s exit from Essendon this week was not the same story as his departure from North Melbourne in 2019. At North, he stepped aside with dignity and was praised by Ben Buckley as acting in a way that was “nothing short of selfless and honourable”. At Essendon, Scott was sacked, absent from the press conference on Tuesday, and left behind a club that still looked split on what it wanted to be.
That difference matters because Scott’s last act at North came with a clean handover and a shared line of hope. Buckley said there was “nothing but blue sky for North”, and Scott himself used the same phrase. This time there was no such easy ending. Many around Essendon never believed he was the right fit, and he was never fully embraced by the club’s people or its senior players. The hiring panel — Josh Mahoney, Andrew Thorburn, Jordan Lewis and Robert Walls — backed him, but the backing never seemed to become belief.
Scott took the job burdened by the mistakes of previous regimes and by a club that had already spent years tripping over itself. There was instability around him almost from the start. The clarity, alignment and messaging about whether Essendon was actually rebuilding came far too late, and the club’s wretched run with injuries only made the noise louder. It left Scott trying to coach through uncertainty that was not entirely of his making.
He spoke on Channel Seven the night after his departure and used the moment to talk about more than his own exit. Scott pointed to the failings of a club that has never properly moved on from the supplements scandal, the wound that still shapes how Essendon sees itself and how others see it. The problem for the Bombers is that the search for a quick fix has kept running into the same wall: a club desperate for instant success, but never fully settled on how to get there.
That is why the shadow of James Hird still hangs over the place nearly four years after he came within a hair of reclaiming the top job in September 2022. Hird and Kevin Sheedy were the headline acts at Essendon’s sesquicentennial celebrations a few months earlier, when Hird emerged through a thick plume of smoke at the MCG and current players and old legends linked arms in a circle in the goal square. Sheedy believed his man would get the job; he was on Lindsay Fox’s luxury yacht when he expected the appointment, and a fortnight later he was told Hird had missed out. Even now, the spectre of Hird still looms large.
Scott’s dismissal is therefore bigger than one coaching change. It is another reminder that Essendon has not solved the deeper problem beneath the churn: who it trusts, what it stands for, and whether it can finally settle on a direction before the next reset arrives.
