WHO DID it better worse?

A. Carlton (first quarter v Fremantle) B. Gold Coast (fourth quarter v St Kilda) C. Adelaide (third quarter v Hawthorn)

They combined to score a meagre four behinds and lose by 112 points in those horribly lopsided terms at the weekend.

The game was effectively over for both the Blues and Crows by the end of their quarters, while the Suns coughed up a 31-point three-quarter time edge to suffer a seventh straight defeat.

Gold Coast has infamously accumulated only two behinds across its past four final terms, the equal-third least productive month-long stretch in a single quarter ever – and lowest since 1901.

Let that sink in.

The fact it came against the Saints was fitting, given it is them who hold the unwanted record.

WORST FOUR-GAME, SINGLE-QUARTER PERFORMANCES

• Gold Coast had the bye in round 10

As for Carlton, the club's scoring woes reared its ugly head again in a goalless opening half.

The Blues have failed to score in triple digits in 45 consecutive matches, which is still well short of St Kilda's horrid streak of 172 games from 1897 to 1907.

But the question at the top was: who did it worse?

They were all awful and obviously playing different opposition, so the easiest way to determine that was to compare their weekend effort in the highlighted quarter against their season standard.

That's where Adelaide emerges as the side which arguably went missing most, narrowly from Brendon Bolton's under-fire foot soldiers, in its third-quarter implosion to the Hawks.

Don Pyke's Crows turned in club season-worst differentials in points (minus-44, sixth-worst in the AFL this year) and metres gained (minus-650, 10th-worst).

They were also in the negative in clearances (-14, Adelaide's second-worst differential in 2018), inside 50s (-11, fourth-worst), contested possessions (-16, fifth-worst) and disposals (-35, sixth-worst).

The disclaimer is the Crows went into battle without best-22 staples Rory Sloane, Rory Laird, Tom Lynch, Mitch McGovern, Brad Crouch, Riley Knight, Luke Brown and Brodie Smith.

But this is the same side that demolished the Western Bulldogs in round nine, in large part owing to its record-breaking contested possession haul of 213.

Sloane, McGovern, both Crouch brothers – Matt and Brad – Knight, Brown and Smith were all out that night.

Adelaide started the second half on Saturday only four points behind Hawthorn before eventually suffering a 56-point loss.

The Crows' midfield still included the likes of Bryce Gibbs, Matt Crouch, Hugh Greenwood and Richard Douglas, with a triple All Australian-shortlisted ruckman in Sam Jacobs feeding them.

Tom Mitchell, Jaeger O'Meara and Shaun Burgoyne are household names, but 43-gamer Daniel Howe, a still-emerging talent, won three of the Hawks' 17 clearances in the term in question.

Worth noting, too, is that Hawthorn ranked only 14th and 13th, respectively, before the game in average differential in clearances and contested possessions.

Scarier still for Adelaide was that this wasn't the first, or even the worst, serious beating it suffered in clearances this season.

Collingwood had a whopping 17 more than the Crows in the fourth term of their round four match at Adelaide Oval.

Thank God for the bye, huh, Don?

Ferocious Tigers are back

Is it any coincidence that the first time Richmond united Daniel Rioli, Jason Castagna and Dan Butler this season that its pressure spiked?

The Tigers' suffocating pressure was heralded as a key pillar in their drought-busting premiership triumph last year, but they have yo-yoed somewhat in that area in 2018.

Port Adelaide leads the AFL this year in average pressure factor (1.866), while Collingwood is No.1 in pressure factor differential (0.078).

Richmond dipped below a pressure factor of 1.76 on six occasions this season, but Sunday's win over Geelong coincided with it registering back-to-back efforts of at least 1.9 for the first time.

Geelong's deceptive success in intercept scoring

The Cats' ability to convert 23.6 per cent of their intercepts into scores in the past four rounds ranks third in the competition.

But that lofty standing owes mostly to Patrick Dangerfield, Gary Ablett and Zach Tuohy, who are the top three players in the AFL in this period out of the top-100 interceptors.

Geelong scored from 53 per cent of Dangerfield's intercepts, 47 per cent of Ablett's and 44 per cent of Tuohy's.

Take them out of the equation and the Cats' scoring rate slumps to only 19 per cent, which would place them just ninth.