The Elimination Final winners were crossed into the Semi-Finals — EF1's winner
met the QF2 loser and EF2's the QF1 loser. The AFL feeds them straight through:
SF1 is the QF1 loser against the EF1 winner and SF2 the QF2 loser against the
EF2 winner. The crossover in this system lands a round later, at Semi-Final →
Preliminary Final, so a Qualifying Final loser cannot meet the side that just
beat it — that part was already right and is unchanged.
In 2026 that drew Fremantle v Adelaide and Brisbane v Geelong, when Fremantle
played Geelong and Brisbane played Adelaide.
Placement now reconciles both Semi-Final slots on every Elimination Final
result rather than writing the one it was called for, so correcting a recorded
result moves the qualifier instead of leaving the beaten team alive in a semi.
A slot held by anyone who never played an Elimination Final still raises
"already filled", and a Semi-Final that has been played refuses the move rather
than rewriting who contested it.
The simulator paired the Semi-Finals the same crossed way, which biased every
projection running off an undecided Elimination Final; it now feeds straight
through too.
Brackets already advanced under the crossover keep their wrong pairings, since
no admin action re-runs advancement — a completed match cannot be re-submitted.
Admin → the event's bracket gains a "Fix Semi-Final Pairings" button that runs
the same reconciliation over a bracket as it stands.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MSDeNWAXvK7nznJqjxn7Jo
