Port Adelaide's decision to enact a coaching succession plan with Ken Hinkley and Josh Carr will go down as one of the 'dumbest' calls in recent AFL history, according to Garry Lyon.
Prior to the 2025 season, the Power publicly announced this would be Hinkley's last season, with assistant coach Carr to take over the main coaching role in 2026.
However, after finishing in the top four the past two seasons, Port Adelaide currently sit 13th on the AFL ladder, and have lost five matches by more than 70 points.
Lyon believes that coaching succession plans simply don't work and that the Power should have played the whole season with Carr in charge.
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"The lesson here for any club, and I’ll try to simplify it down to this one statement - You can only have one senior coach at a club at one time," Lyon told SEN Breakfast.
"That is as simple as you can say it. If you want it, you go back to it and say - and this is not a crack at Ken Hinkley, I think they’ve hung him out to dry – ‘Ken, you’re not coaching us beyond this year’.
"They made a decision on their senior coach, so Ken would have rightly said ‘okay, pay me out and I’ll head off’. I don’t know if he did, but they said, ‘no, you’re going to coach the year, and not only are you going to coach the year, but we’ve appointed the bloke who is going to succeed you, and he’s going to sit over your shoulder for the whole year’.
"That will go down as one of the dumbest things in recent times. As a result of that, then you go, ‘okay, let’s review our decision, how did it go?’"
In what will be Hinkley's final match in charge, Port Adelaide will finish their season with a home match against Gold Coast on Friday night.