Forget the Draft, the talk of tanking and peptides, forget the pre-season contest with its quirky scoring, rule-changes, and surprise results; you can only feel assured that a new season has truly commenced once the www.afl.com.au website has buckled under the apparently startling load.

To be fair, the AFL site was accepting visitors come the second quarter of Friday night's game, but by then I'd found the reliability of other websites more compelling, so I can't vouch for its availability thereafter. You'd reckon the AFL might do a little more to ensure that its online porch-light was blazing - or, at the very least, turned on - for the first game of the season.

None of the sites I visited though was providing the view I was hoping for on Friday night, as the Crows squandered an early 4-goal lead to eventually go down to the Dons by 35 points, failing expansively to cover the 15.5 point handicap they - and by financial contagion we - were offering. Freo's 28-point win on Saturday night evened our line-betting win-loss ledger and reduced our Line Fund losses, but the Crows' loss on the Line and SuperMargin markets still left us down by three-tenths of a cent on the weekend.

With both favourites finishing winless, all but one of the Head-to-Head Tipsters is currently on 0 from 2, HSH being the exception and benefitting from the Dockers' designation as the Home team in its derby with the Eagles.

Amongst the Margin Predictors, only CNN1's tip that Fremantle would win by 3 goals stands out as particularly prescient, while scanning the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors we find that it's the Bookmaker-based Predictors whose caution has proven wisest.

There's still seven games to go though before we draw a cliched line under the 1st round ...