There's been a bit of noise surrounding the state of the game and prevalence of blowouts in recent times, so I thought I'd have a bit of a dig into some data to see how things look in reality.
I've gone with the years 2005-2025 because I like round numbers and 20 years seems like a decent chunk of time that covers a bit of change within the rules, with the introduction of the "6-6-6 rule" in 2019 and "stand rule" in 2021 being changes regularly cited when discussing this supposed increase in blowouts.
First some general data:
Interestingly, outside of the outlier that is 2020, total scores and margins have remained relatively stable throughout the past 20 years. Perhaps unintuitively it would actually appear that the extreme outliers of margins of 96+ and scores of 126+have actually decreased slightly in recent years.
For less general data, I also did a direct comparison between the 7 years since 2019 (introduction of 6-6-6) and the 7 years prior; which appears to tell a similar story.
All in all results tend to fluctuate throughout the years, but it doesn't seem that any sizeable or consistent change has occurred in either margins or scores across the last 20 years.
(All data was drawn from AFL Tables; so thanks to them for doing the hard yards)