How Many Votes Does It Take to Win the Brownlow Medal?
- downlowonthebrownlow
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 21 hours ago
Winning the Brownlow Medal has taken between 29 and 45 votes over the past five seasons. Patrick Cripps set the record in 2024 with 45 votes, and Matt Rowell's 39 votes in 2025 is the second-highest tally ever recorded under the 3-2-1 system. Downlow on the Brownlow has tracked every count since 2008, and the winning number has climbed sharply in the past three years.
How many votes does it take to win the Brownlow Medal?
There is no fixed number, but there is a clear range — and it has shifted.
For most of the past two decades, a winning tally sat somewhere in the high 20s to mid 30s. Matt Priddis won with 26 in 2014. Patrick Cripps won with 29 in 2022. Lachie Neale won with 31 in 2023.
Then it moved. Cripps polled 45 in 2024 — a record by nine votes. Rowell polled 39 in 2025. Two of the three highest tallies in the history of the 3-2-1 system have come in the past two seasons.
For 2026, Downlow on the Brownlow's working assumption is that a winning score lands in the mid-to-high 30s, and that anything under 30 would now be an outlier rather than a norm.
The winning tally, year by year
Year | Winner | Votes |
2025 | Matt Rowell | 39 |
2024 | Patrick Cripps | 45 |
2023 | Lachie Neale | 31 |
2022 | Patrick Cripps | 29 |
2021 | Ollie Wines | 36 |
2020 | Lachie Neale | 31 |
2019 | Nat Fyfe | 33 |
Why the number keeps climbing
Three things are happening at once.
Votes are concentrating in fewer players. In 2024, the entire top ten was midfielders, and between them they took roughly a quarter of every vote awarded across the season. When the same profile of player takes votes week after week, the leader's tally grows.
The gap between the top and the bottom has become extreme. Cripps's 45 votes in 2024 was more than the combined total of every player at North Melbourne, West Coast or Richmond that year. West Coast's entire list polled 12 votes across the 2025 season — the lowest club tally ever recorded under 3-2-1.
The umpires are rewarding a narrower type of game. High-possession, high-clearance inside midfielders poll relentlessly. Rowell ranked second in the AFL for clearances and third for both tackles and contested possessions in 2025, and polled in 16 separate games.
The practical effect for anyone projecting the count: the ceiling has moved. Models built on the assumption that 32 wins a Brownlow have been undershooting.
What it takes to win in 2026
Three things travel together in almost every recent winner:
Eight or more best-on-ground performances. Rowell had eight in 2025. Cripps had twelve in 2024.
Polling in more than half the season's games. Rowell polled in 16.
A team winning enough games to matter. Umpires vote off winning sides far more often than losing ones, which is why a career-best year at a bottom-four club rarely converts.
A player can be the best in the competition and still not win. That is what makes the count worth projecting rather than assuming.
How Downlow on the Brownlow projects the count
Downlow on the Brownlow does not run a single model. Each season it combines the vote counts of 15–20 independent expert analysts, each of whom counts every home-and-away match 3-2-1 on their own, and blends those counts into one consensus projection covering every player and every game.
The full 2026 projection — player by player, match by match, with projected vote totals for every contender — is available in the Spreadsheet and the Package.
The 2026 Brownlow Medal count is on Monday 21 September at Crown Palladium, Melbourne.
Think you can pick the top four? Entry to the Downlow on the Brownlow tipping competition is free, and there's a $1,000 prize pack up for grabs.
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