If history was your guide, you could forgive Adelaide for already giving up on season 2024. After all, in the past half century, just one team, Sydney in 2017, has started a season 0-4 and gone on to play finals.

But maybe, sometimes, you just need to find the right slice of history. Along with a determination to look for any sort of positives. And perhaps there’s still some hope for the Crows on those fronts.

Adelaide have so far played Gold Coast, Geelong, Fremantle and Melbourne. While three of those opponents didn’t play finals, the Suns, Cats and Dockers already all look vastly improved on last year’s models.

Only one of the Crows’ defeats has been by any more than 19 points, hence their percentage of 75, miles ahead of the other winless teams: Hawthorn, North Melbourne and West Coast.

Perhaps, though, there’s an even brighter light at the end of the tunnel in the shape of last year’s AFL ladder.

As late as Round 15 last season, Sydney, GWS and Carlton occupied 13th, 14th and a miserable 15th spot on the ladder respectively. With 14 games played by everyone, the Swans and Giants had won just six each, and the Blues only five and a draw.

GWS and Carlton would, of course, go on to narrowly lose preliminary finals, and the Swans were pipped in an elimination final. Those are three sizeable turnarounds. Can we really already say definitively that Adelaide aren’t capable of something similar?

Not, I’d argue, when the gap between most teams in the competition is increasingly wafer thin. Sure, we bemoan West Coast’s apparently abject state, but wasn’t that the same team which last week was neck and neck with Sydney at three-quarter time and lost by only 26 points?

The point being that it doesn’t necessarily take a whole lot of tweaking to make a substantial difference to a team’s performance. And Adelaide aren’t doing everything wrong, even in defeat.