APART from Geelong winning, which has become almost a given, the most predictable thing about a weekend’s round of footy is its unpredictability.

One of the certainties is that every Monday morning the football landscape is different than it was the previous week.

Eight winners, eight losers, big winners, big losers, lucky winners, unlucky losers, close wins, close losses. Each round of the season has its own unique set of circumstances.

I think it is great that only a month in, every team has now won a game. 

It highlights the ridiculous ‘will they be sacked?’ innuendo regarding coaches so early in the season.

Both Terry Wallace at Richmond and Mark Harvey at Fremantle, who were having their immediate coaching futures questioned, have their teams only one win behind eighth-placed Collingwood and last year's premiers Hawthorn.

One win and both clubs are back within striking distance of the eight.

Talk about a week being a long time in footy.

So what has the first five rounds left us to ponder?

Every team starts the season with its own levels of deep-down hope and confidence.

As every team has great summers without losing for six months, the hopes are normally artificially inflated.

Before round one began, Geelong and Hawthorn would have been the most optimistic and Melbourne the least.

Realistically the Cats and Hawks were thinking they were potential premiers and Melbourne was probably thinking that avoiding the wooden spoon would be a pleasant post season outcome. Every other team was somewhere in between.

Every match either erodes or encourages the validity of these pre-season levels of optimism.

While the vagaries of who you have played and where distorts early season form trends, we are now over 20 per cent into the season.

After five rounds, in a broad sense, the performances of St Kilda, Carlton, Essendon, West Coast and probably Melbourne have supported pre-season levels of optimism.

Those who have had their hopes diminished  would be Hawthorn, Richmond, Fremantle, North Melbourne, Collingwood, Sydney Swans and the Brisbane Lions.

Which leaves Geelong, the Western Bulldogs, Port Adelaide and Adelaide as teams whose levels of hope and confidence have remained roughly the same.

Next Monday these groupings will change again, which is why taking it one week at a time is a necessity, not PR spin. 

What we can do now is completely dismiss 2008 performances as a guide to the future. What happened last season should be consigned to the history books.

For example Hawthorn might be last year’s premiers but at the moment are not producing anywhere near that level. For now they are merely one of the mid-ladder bunch fighting to win games to prevent further erosion of their deep-down belief systems.

Of course the Hawks have plenty of good players missing. But to assume that those players’ returns will automatically trigger a return to the premiership-winning level of  late 2008  is wishful thinking.

Buddy Franklin has played every game and again may be the leading goalkicker, yet he is a mile behind the player he was for most of last year. 

Good form and momentum is hard to find and easy to lose.

The reservoir of confidence that teams and players took into this season has now been replaced and updated by what has happened in the five games played to date.

Injuries and suspensions to key players will continue to help or hinder – help if they hit this week’s opponents and hinder if they happen to your team.

Collingwood playing North Melbourne without Brent Harvey on Friday night is an enormous plus for the Magpies’ winning chances and an obvious major blow to the Kangaroos.

Anyone who believes that every team suffers injuries and the pain is equally shared knows very little about the practicalities of the game.

The same can be said of the 50/50 umpiring decisions. Sometimes they go your way, sometimes they don’t.

If Anthony Rocca had not been penalised for being too strong last Saturday, the goal he kicked would probably have won the game for the Magpies.

Results are determined by seconds and inches all the time which is why the footy season rollercoaster will continue to take us all on a wild and unpredictable ride from week to week.

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.