Five hundred and thirty-one days is a long time to wait for a football match. For Tanner Bruhn, that wait ends this Friday night when Geelong face Gold Coast in their 2026 AFL season opener, and his coach wants everyone to understand exactly what those 531 days cost a 23-year-old man who did nothing wrong.
"It's just fantastic for him to get out there and be able to concentrate on footy after what is one of the most egregious injustices I can think of in the game," Geelong coach Chris Scott told reporters on Tuesday. The Cats coach was measured but pointed, the kind of plain-speaking that comes when someone has carried quiet fury for a long time.
Bruhn was stood down by the AFL when charged with rape and intentional sexual touching. Those charges were dropped last November when the complainant admitted lying. The Crown Prosecutor withdrew the charges after two witnesses were found to have lied under oath, and Victoria Police subsequently agreed to pay Bruhn's and his co-accused's legal costs.
Bruhn last played in the 2024 preliminary final loss against Brisbane, 531 days ago on Friday. He sat out an entire AFL season in circumstances most supporters only became aware of when suppression orders were lifted at the Geelong Magistrates Court last November. Scott was reluctant to detail the support he offered to the 23-year-old Bruhn, who has played 66 AFL games since his debut in 2021 at GWS, before transferring to Geelong at the end of the 2022 season.
The central governance question raised by this case is one the AFL Players Association pressed loudly in November and has not gone away: was it appropriate to stand Bruhn down at all? Unlike the NRL or Football Australia, the AFL does not have an official no-fault stand-down policy, where players charged with serious criminal offences are banned from playing. Yet Bruhn was stood down anyway, without that formal framework in place.
The AFLPA argued in a statement that "Tanner was entitled to the presumption of innocence from the outset and throughout" and that "it was clear to us that standing Tanner down would be premature and disproportionate." That is a powerful position. Presumption of innocence is foundational to any fair legal and institutional system, and when the charges ultimately collapsed due to fabricated evidence, it is hard to argue the players union had it wrong.
AFL CEO Andrew Dillon, for his part, pushed back on calls for a formalised no-fault stand-down policy. "The AFL has an ability to stand down but it is on a case-by-case basis," Dillon told reporters. "We start with AFL and AFLW players are absolute role models. And I don't think we need to have a set stand down rule. I think it is something that you have to have in your armoury, but it is not something that we would use often." Dillon's position is not without logic: codified no-fault stand-down rules, as seen in the NRL's application to Jack de Belin, can themselves produce protracted injustices. Discretion, applied properly, can be fairer than blunt mandatory frameworks.
The problem, of course, is that discretion exercised poorly produces exactly the outcome Bruhn experienced. A full season erased from a young man's career, with no formal policy to guide or constrain the decision-making, and no public accountability while suppression orders held. The AFL Players Union was highly critical of both the AFL's actions and Victoria Police, because even though a suppression order was in place, the investigation was widely known and caused enormous stress to Bruhn.
"It's been fantastic, we're so thrilled as players to have him back, to see him smile," Geelong captain Patrick Dangerfield said. "It's been a challenging 12 months for Tanner and the club, but I'm really proud with the way he has gone about it."
Scott trialled Bruhn at half-back instead of his customary midfield position during the pre-season. The acquisition of Bailey Smith and James Worpel in the past two off-seasons has seen the 23-year-old add half-back to his skill set. Scott was keen to downplay expectations around the comeback itself. "It's his first game back but he's really been training and he played a practice game against Carlton, he's kind of ready to go," Scott said. "So I think we'll all look back and think this was a small step, it's important that we don't overplay it."
That is sensible advice. Bruhn deserves the chance to simply play football again, to let his boots do the talking without the weight of a year's worth of trauma riding on every contest. The AFL, for its part, faces a genuine reckoning. Whether or not a codified stand-down policy is the right answer, the absence of a clear, transparent framework leaves both players and the public poorly served when cases like this arise. Reasonable people can disagree on what that framework should look like, but the Bruhn case makes one thing hard to dispute: deciding it on the fly, behind closed doors, with suppression orders keeping the public in the dark, is not a process that inspires confidence in the league's commitment to fairness. That conversation, at least, has finally begun in earnest.