Damian Barrett said he is now nearly all-in on the Crows after their round 13 win over the Dogs on Thursday night, a shift that came with real qualification. The Crows finished the night at 8-5, and Barrett still said they have plenty of work to do before anyone treats them like the finished article.
That is why the change matters now. Barrett has spent the past two seasons questioning the Crows, but he said there is a very different feel to this club in 2026 and that he really likes it. The Crows have given him enough to rethink that view, and he said the Jordan Dawson story is compelling on every level while Izak Rankine is expected to return. Taken together, that is enough to explain why the club is back in focus after a result that pushed it deeper into the conversation around the 2026 Toyota AFL Premiership Season.
Barrett did not dress it up as blind faith. He said there is still a lot of work to do at the Crows, which is the part that keeps this from sounding like a full conversion. But the direction of travel is clear. A team that he had regularly questioned now has him nearly all-in, and the reason is not just the win itself. It is the way the Crows are starting to look in 2026, with the return of Rankine looming and Dawson at the centre of the story Barrett finds so compelling.
The same column also turned to the Bombers, who are expected next week to publicly reveal their plans around the search for yet another coach. Barrett said he would be really keen to see how they word those plans, because he expects there will almost without doubt be a declaration of intent for an exhaustive process. That choice of language matters. In this case, the club is not just picking a coach; it is trying to convince everyone that the search itself is being handled with purpose.
Barrett also ranged further across the competition, saying Fly won a flag in 2023 and has reached a prelim final in two other seasons across four years as a senior coach. He said the Pies were sitting 11th after 13 rounds of 2026, while Luke Jackson is closing hard in his view of the best player in the comp. He also noted that Gaz jnr joined Gaz snr in the Australian Football Hall of Fame this week as a first ballot inductee. But the sharpest line in his round 13 take remained the one about the Crows: nearly all-in, but not all the way there yet.
That leaves the Crows with something more valuable than praise and less comfortable than certainty. Barrett likes what he sees, but he is still keeping score, and the next test is whether the team can turn a strong month into something that changes the way it is judged for the rest of 2026.
