You only have to hark back to this time last year, when Essendon chose to fly rather than take the bus to Wangaratta for a NAB Challenge match against St Kilda, only to be unable to land in the Victorian regional centre because of stormy weather.
It soon emerged that Essendon's sports science department had made the decision to fly, having pre-determined that the two-hour bus trip back to Melbourne after the game would have been harmful to the players' recovery.
The Bombers were widely pilloried afterwards and the episode was pointed to as a prime example of sports scientists in football becoming a law unto themselves.
What the AFL would like to do is simply click its fingers and have the sports medical fraternity step in and wrest the power back from the scientists.
If only it was that easy.
The AFL's medical fraternity remains a hugely respected and important part of the game, but sadly, there aren't enough of them.
In Australia and New Zealand there are only about 150 Sports and Exercise Physicians - the lofty sounding name for fully accredited sports doctors - and only between four and eight come into the system every year.
There simply aren’t enough around for them to be employed by AFL clubs on a full-time basis as, say, director of medical services, which means the best that clubs can hope for is to have doctors around part of the time, usually for early week consultations and major training sessions as well as match days.
Their relative scarcity in the medical community means they can comfortably make upwards of $300,000 per year in private practice, which in some cases, includes part-time consultancy to elite football teams in the AFL and NRL.
For all the millions of dollars they turn over each, AFL clubs are not in a position to make it financially worthwhile for sports doctors to give up private practice to work full-time in football.
Sports scientists come cheaper than doctors and are most certainly available full-time, which is why they have been able to wield positions of enormous influence at some clubs.
"It's surprising that more graduates don't want to become sports doctors because this is a sports-mad country," one veteran sports doctor told AFL.com.au.
One reason could be that sports doctors are finding it to tough to beat the system.
Training for all the other medical specialties is heavily subsidised by the Federal Government through the public hospital system, whereas sports medicine training is nearly all from within the private sector and relies on the goodwill of senior sports doctors to provide the teaching for no financial reward.
The Australian College of Sports Physicians battled for more than 20 years to finally receive specialty status, but the sense of satisfaction felt by the fraternity was quickly shattered when the government decided to set the Medicare rebates for consultations by sports doctors way below those of other medical specialists.
There are a fair few graduates who love sport and would consider making it their future, but once they do the sums and make some comparisons, they discover there are many other medical specialties that are far more lucrative.
The AFL has thrown its support behind bids in the past to get more aspiring sports physicians into the system. Former football operations general manager Adrian Anderson last year supported an unsuccessful bid by Dr John Orchard, a former doctor with the Sydney Swans and now with the NRL's Sydney Roosters, for a registrar to be appointed to Sydney University's Department of Health & Ageing.
"There is a shortage of suitably qualified sports physicians at AFL level because demand for the specialty is exceeding the current supply," Anderson wrote.
"Some AFL clubs are even competing with each other for those physicians who are available. This issue is exacerbated by the ageing of current AFL club sport physicians, as we have observed with several doctors retiring in recent years."
Given that we are only about 20 years into the football's full-time professional era, there are still remnants of the earlier system where the club doctor was a local GP, perhaps a friend of the president who would come to training after a full day's work at their surgery and then be at every match.
Whether there will be full-time sports physicians at AFL clubs any time in the future is debatable. But the events of the last few days have sparked lots of "what if" discussions around the whiteboards of Australia's leading sports leagues about what might happen if funding could be made available to underwrite the training of more sports physicians.
"One of the reasons given for lack of government support for sports medicine is a suggestion that sport itself needs to do more to help," noted Dr Peter Brukner, a former AFL club doctor who now works primarily in soccer and cricket.
Which might soon be the case.
“We are conscious of the challenges in attracting suitably qualified medical professionals into the competition and are actively considering ways of addressing the issue," said an AFL spokesman.
Even with the creation of a few more training positions each year, it will take between six and eight years for more sports physicians to enter the AFL landscape and to create enough of a supply so they can work exclusively for football clubs.
Last week's report by the Australian Crimes Commission cast a black cloud over the AFL. Just how large remains to be seen. But if some good is to come from it, it might be that it finally prods the League into some action to rein in the sports scientists, something it has talked about for years but might only now be putting into action.
And there remains hope that the Federal Government might match last week's rhetoric with some cash of its own. Said Orchard: "Now that the government is saying there are too many non-trained people entering the sports scene we can again ask the question why it continues to underfund mainstream sports medicine."
You can follow AFL Media senior writer Ashley Browne on Twitter @afl_hashbrowne
