"Utterly perplexing": Should North look for more experience in their next coach?

With North Melbourne on the hunt for its next senior AFL coach, Gerard Whateley has criticised the club's lack of inclusion towards more experienced coaches.

Having parted ways with Alastair Clarkson after four years of service, plenty of contenders have emerged for the vacant position.

One of those was Adam Simpson, who, after some deliberation, decided not to go through the selection process.

Reflecting on the decision he made on Thursday, the two-time premiership player with the Roos thinks he wasn’t the type of candidate they were after.

“I'm not quite sure what to say,” Simpson said on SEN’s Crunch Time.

“If we're talking about the North situation, North needs to do what North needs to do, so I think they're a broad approach, and they just want the best coach for the football club.

“I get the sense I might not be what they're looking for, I suppose, or if I'm gonna go through the process, I might prove them wrong a little bit that, perhaps, there's a first timer out there that can grow with the club and the team, not that they said that directly.

“It's just making assumptions and working through whether the process is right for you, so it wasn't for me.”

While Simpson had pulled out of the race, another premiership coach and former Kangaroo, John Longmire, is yet to publicly take a stance on whether he wants the position, having reportedly given more thought to the idea.

There is a belief the club would be in favour of choosing a first-time coach from the assistant coaching ranks who is currently in the game.

But given Longmire only left his coaching role at the end of the 2024 season, Simpson thinks his former teammate is certainly still capable of coaching in 2026.

“But the general question around (is) has the game evolved that much that John Longmire can't coach anymore?” he continued.

“That's ridiculous. To suggest that the game has moved to a level where these guys who have been out of the system for a while can't do it anymore, it's probably not quite true.

“But I think it's just the cycle we're in.”

Whateley admitted he has been confused by how the current coaching landscape has come to be.

"I find the coaching landscape utterly perplexing at the moment," he said.

He also felt that clubs have become too quick to discard coaches after their first stint.

“If I was North Melbourne…in this moment in time, I have two Premiership players who went on to be Premiership coaches,” Whateley explained.

“I would have had a stream possible to incorporate them into a process without it being rigidly regarding this criteria which is weighted toward.

“I would have wanted to answer the question, what would it look like with Longmire and Simpson back here other than, ‘No, we're just going for a first-time coach’.

“I would want them in my sphere, and I wouldn't be so rigid on criteria and processes that they aren't in my sphere.

“This is a unique moment in time, and I can't stress this enough; these two men are so unrelated to the Clarkson experience.

“I think it's clouded the whole thing. Clarkson is the messiah complex. Longmire and Simpson have nothing to do with that.

“It's really easy to identify the difference between the two, but not if you're going, nah, second time coach, it never works, or no, we went for the Messiah, we're not doing that again.

“These are not the Messiah, and they're not old men.”

The Kangaroos appointed their six-person coach selection panel last week, which features club CEO Jennifer Watt, GM of Football Todd Viney and the recently retired Steele Sidebottom.