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Sport Nation
The biggest regret of former Adelaide ruckman’s career
SEN • May 11th, 2025 5:06 pm
Former Adelaide ruckman Sam Jacobs enjoyed a great AFL career with three clubs.
After being drafted by Carlton in 2007 and playing 17 games in navy blue, he’d be traded to Adelaide ahead of the 2011 season, where he’d feature 184 times over nine years before finishing his career with seven more appearances in 2020 with GWS.
It was his time in Adelaide that Jacobs looks back on most fondly, where he was a three-time All-Australian squad member and three-time Showdown Medallist.
Jacobs’ best year from a team perspective in the City of Churches came in 2017 when the Crows made it all the way to the Grand Final before going down to Richmond.
While they went down after entering the game as favourites, Jacobs still looks back on that decider as his greatest footy day, as not every player gets the opportunity to run out in the last day of September.
It was after that where things went pear-shaped for Adelaide, with the famous 2018 pre-season camp sending fractures through the club, and the Crows haven’t made finals since.
Jacobs looks back on that 2018 pre-season as the biggest regret of his career as the Crows couldn’t recover despite having one of the best lists in football that won the minor premiership easily the year prior.
“That's probably my biggest regret,” Jacobs told This is Your Journey – thanks to Tobin Brothers.
“We just missed an opportunity to cash in on the team we had. Most of that sort of group left at the end of 2019, and we still had probably two or three years after 2017 to give it another crack.
“We probably just lost our way in terms of thinking of the areas we need to improve on, rather than just putting it down to a bad day and just learning from that and getting better.
“Unfortunately, we went down the path of trying to retrain mentally and do all this extra stuff, rather than just focusing on doing the fundamentals well and getting back there again the next year.
“I think if I had my time again, I'd like to think I’d speak up a lot more. But at that stage, you're so immersed in it that you just want to do the right thing by the coaches and the playing group, and you just listen to the guys that are mentoring you at the time.”
Jacobs discussed his career and much more in this week’s episode.
Listen to Jacobs’ full chat with Sam Edmund below.
