It is just plain wrong.
There are enough inequities, enough flaws, enough uncontrollables in an AFL home-and-away season without the finals series also being heavily compromised.
Yet that is exactly what has happened this September, with the Hawks being subjected to an extremely unjust scheduling of its preliminary final.
Should Hawthorn, as expected, defeat Adelaide at the MCG on Saturday, it will have a day less than its opponent - the Sydney Swans or Collingwood - to prepare for the Grand Final.
That is a massive disadvantage, and everyone in football knows it. Certainly, Hawthorn does, which was why its CEO and chairman strongly argued to the AFL that their club's preliminary final be played on the Friday.
When told that was not possible, they requested a Saturday afternoon slot. They were disappointed to be assigned a 5.15pm start.
Having finished on top of the ladder after the home-and-away season, and then winning its qualifying final which gave it a week's rest, Hawthorn had clearly earned the right to a Friday preliminary final.
And let's not forget that it had already been subjected to an AFL-designed home-and-away fixture which was far tougher than many other clubs, particularly that faced by the team that finished second, Adelaide.
In failing to secure access to Sydney's ANZ Stadium - the NSW venue which is contracted to play AFL finals - for this coming Saturday, the AFL has disadvantaged Hawthorn in a manner best described as unfair.
For an organisation that espouses to operate by world's best practices - and that is a regular claim made by people within the AFL - is it acceptable that it can not pull rank on the National Rugby League over use of ANZ Stadium?
Maybe AFL commission chairman Mike Fitzpatrick, who is involved privately with a company that operates ANZ Stadium, could have stepped in on behalf of the AFL.
Even if we concede that such AFL precedence over NRL is not possible, why, then, was the SCG not used? That way, the Swans-Magpies preliminary final could have been played on the day it was meant to be played - Saturday, and not Friday.
The AFL says that to use the SCG on this occasion would have been to potentially rob 30,000 spectators of a chance to watch the game live.
The preliminary final botch-up is not the first in the 2012 finals series, either. In week one, Perth's Patersons Stadium was unavailable for use on the Saturday because of a rugby union Test Match.
Fortunately, only one of the Perth teams qualified for a home final that week, which mitigated the potentially disastrous effect of such a situation.
So the AFL has access, when it wants, to grounds across the country for 23 weeks of the home-and-away season yet on what we have witnessed in two of the three weeks of this year's finals series, it doesn't have guaranteed access to some when the matches are at their most important - in September.
There are so many matters football clubs can not control within a season. And the really good ones, like Hawthorn, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on situations that may make them 1 or 2 per cent better.
It is money and resources wasted when the governing body removes from you an advantage that had been well and truly earned.
Hawthorn has very professionally handled the public side of this situation, as to complain would be to send a negative message to opponents.
Privately it is infuriated and frustrated, and rightly so, for what the AFL has done to it is just plain wrong.
You can follow Damian Barrett on Twitter @barrettdamian
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the AFL or its clubs.
