Jack Graham

ESPN's Christopher Doerre also had Graham as likely second or third round pick while he was ranked 42nd in Draft Central's projections.

He was projected to be selected at pick 23 and pick 24 by AFL Media's Callum Twomey and The Age's Emma Quayle respectively in their draft day phantom drafts.

Under 18 National Championships

Jack Graham (born 25 February 1998) is a professional Australian rules footballer playing for the Richmond Football Club in the Australian Football League (AFL).

In 2013 he captained the under 15s South Australian representative schoolboys team at the year's national championships.

The following year he captained the premiership winning South Australian side at the Under 16 national championships.

Graham made his SANFL senior debut with North Adelaide in June 2015.

He had 15 possessions in the match, along with six marks, three tackles and two clearances.

That year he was also selected to play for his state at the under 18 national championships as a bottom aged player.

He finished the tournament having played two matches.

In the 2015/16 off-season Graham was a member of the 33-man AFL Academy squad.

As part of the program he spent a fortnight training with the AFL's in December 2015.

He also joined the other members of the elite group in a training camp in Melbourne and another in the United States.

A quad injury sustained during this period however, saw his summer partially interrupted.

As a junior he captained South Australia at the 2016 AFL Under 18 Championships and won the Larke Medal as the competition's best player.

After being drafted by Richmond in the third round of the 2016 draft, he made his debut in round 22 of the 2017 season, before becoming a premiership player in just his fifth career AFL game.

He is a co-holder of the AFL record for most tackles on debut.

Graham spent his formative years in the North eastern Adelaide suburb of Greenwith.

Graham participated in the Auskick program at Golden Grove and played junior football with Tea Tree Gully in the North Eastern Metro Junior Football Association.

He later joined North Adelaide's development program at age 12 where he began playing representative junior football.

In 2016 Graham was selected to represent and captain the South Australian side at the national under 18s carnival.

He was named among his state's best players in three of his four games at the tournament His 25 disposals and five clearances per game both lead the competition while his 11 contested possessions saw him rank second.

Graham also averaged 318 metres gained in his four matches at the carnival.

Graham was awarded the Larke Medal as the competition's best player, becoming the first South Australian to do so in 14 years.

He was later named in the competition's All Australian team and received South Australia's most valuable player award.

At state level he also performed strongly that year, averaging 24 disposals per game in the SANFL under 18s through the start of June 2016.

A quad injury saw Graham miss the club's finals campaign however and prematurely ended his final season at junior level.

Graham was invited to attend the national draft combine in Melbourne in October 2016.

He did not complete physical testing, however, due to a strained quadriceps muscle.

South Australian junior high performance manager Brenton Phillips likened to Graham to 's Luke Hodge, saying he was a "really hard, inside, contested-ball winner who probably spreads a bit harder than Hodge."

By the time the national draft came around in late November, Graham's stock had dropped considerably.

While the Herald projected Graham in the range 15 to 25, Fox Sport's Ben Waterworth was less confident, citing injuries and poor kicking as reasons for a late second or third round projection.

! scope="row" style="text-align:center" | 2016

! colspan=3| Career

! 4 ! 0 ! — ! 54 ! 46 ! 100 ! 12 ! 17 ! 0.3 ! — ! 13.5 ! 11.5 ! 25.0 ! 3.0 ! 4.3

Graham was drafted by with the club's second pick and the fifty third selection overall, the last pick of the 3rd round, in the 2016 AFL national draft.

In the weeks following the draft, Richmond recruiting manager Matthew Clarke cited Graham's defensive running as a key reason for his selection in addition to his on-ball prowess.

Graham is a two-time premiership player, having featured in grand final wins for Richmond in both 2017 and 2020.

He trained under a limited program in the 2017 pre-season due to the effects of hamstring tendinitis.

Graham remained in the clubs injury rehab ground until early March as a result of the injury, failing to play in the club's JLT Community Series campaign.