You can pull out any number of examples to illustrate how seriously deficient the AFL’s current judiciary system is, but in the 10 seasons of the match review panel’s operation, 2014 has provided the most glaring.

Exhibit A is the one which may well cost Fremantle star Nat Fyfe this year’s Brownlow Medal. In round two, the Docker executed a textbook bump on Gold Coast’s Michael Rischitelli as the Suns player was in the act of kicking.

Fyfe braced himself, tucked his arm into his body, and met Rischitelli’s upper body, as any footballer, young or old, has been taught. Fyfe even had his head turned slightly to avoid a head clash.

But with Rischitelli’s momentum and his weight leaning forward, the pair’s heads accidentally clashed. Given the current mantra about the head being sacrosanct, and carryover points from a previous misdemeanour, the guidelines insisted Fyfe had to be suspended for two matches.

Exhibit B is Richmond’s Reece Conca’s brain explosion against Greater Western Sydney two weekends ago, when he chased the Giants' Devon Smith to the interchange gate and from behind elbowed the unsuspecting GWS player to the back of the head.

A cheap shot by anyone’s standards, not in the course of, or even on the field of play, yet deemed by the panel to be worth a two-game suspension. And that those two incidents, poles apart in terms of intent and image, could attract the same penalty is reason enough to scrap a system which was well-intentioned, but simply hasn’t worked.

Sure, the panel could have elected to send the Conca incident straight to the tribunal, which might have had more flexibility in applying a penalty. But isn’t even that option, meaning two steps to the judicial process rather than one, a fundamental contradiction of one of the major reasons for its introduction, to streamline penalties and save time?

It has become increasingly apparent that a one-size-fits all policy simply can’t be applied to a game with as many variables as AFL football has in terms of the context of incidents and the vastly different circumstances in which they occur.

And that is the case even before you take into account the loadings to penalties based on prior records and discounts for early pleas which so regularly throw the bottom line of a final penalty out of whack, not only in terms of what that isolated incident should attract, but relative to other far more serious or trivial offences.

Not to mention a system so complex in its formula and complicated in its arithmetic that mastery of a calculator has become as indispensable to football justice as a sense of what’s right and wrong.

The ticking of various boxes by the MRP for the nature, level and region of contact has helped foster a process-driven system that too often leaves common sense behind.

Far too much weight is now placed on the consequences of an action rather than its intent. The panel places much stock in the medical reports about a player who has been on the receiving end, but seldom takes into account that comparable blows might badly hurt one player but have a negligible impact on another, depending on the circumstances in which they’re delivered.

And striking, usually more deliberate and less excusable, is one area consistently treated too leniently compared to other offences, thanks to its generous treatment in the MRP’s points table.

The old tribunal system had its flaws, mainly in terms of time spent on frivolous cases. But as someone who covered his share of hearings under it, I’d vouch every time for the consistency of penalties applied by a group of men armed with some discretion, context and overriding sense of what can and can’t be accepted on an AFL field over a rigid set of parameters which can’t by their nature take a more philosophical view of any reportable incident.

MRP chairman Mark Fraser’s spirited defence this week of the Fyfe suspension said everything, really, about what’s wrong with the current AFL judicial system. ''It is a definite rough conduct charge the way we grade things this year,'' Fraser said.

What he didn’t explain was how on earth a fair bump with no malice intended could end up receiving exactly the same penalty as a deliberate king-hit from behind to a player leaving the field. And how that ludicrous bottom line could possibly indicate anything other than a system which, while it may have been noble in its intent and sound in theory, has in practice well and truly failed.