Essendon greats Tim Watson and Matthew Lloyd have ruled themselves out of helping the sub-committee to select the club's next senior coach.
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The Bombers wants to secure a replacement for the departed James Hird by the end of October, and will appoint the sub-committee to make that crucial selection by early next week.
Bombers chief executive Xavier Campbell said the Bombers had approached several people outside the club to join the sub-committee, and nailed down a timeline for the entire process that gives the club just over a month to find their man.
"We'd like to think we would meet as a sub-committee early next week, identify a list of candidates that we want to run through a first-round process with and, hopefully, it's a process we think we can tie up by the end of October," Campbell told Channel Seven on Monday night.
Watson and Lloyd both confirmed on Monday night that they will not play an official role in selecting the new coach, despite their high profiles.
Lloyd's brother Simon - a current assistant coach at Fremantle - is one of the potential candidates so it was unlikely the former three-time Coleman medallist would have sat on a panel that could judge his credentials.
Watson, the father of current Bombers captain Jobe, has admitted to playing a behind-the-scenes role in getting Mark Thompson back to the club in the "dream team" package with Hird the last time the Bombers changed coaches back in 2011.
Watson was approached by Essendon in relation to the sub-committee this time, but the former captain said his media commitments created a conflict of interest that did not allow him to be involved in the process.
However Watson did give his opinion on the potential value of Simon Lloyd as a candidate when asked directly about him on Channel Seven's Talking Footy.
Simon Lloyd, the senior development coach at Fremantle since 2009, became an assistant coach at the Dockers in 2010 and previously worked at Collingwood – where he was the club psychologist and high performance manager – as well as Hawthorn.
"Any time you take on a new coach who hasn't coached at the highest level, there is an element of risk in that. You can mitigate that by the research you do and the experience they have as an assistant," Watson said.
"I have nothing to do with the coaching appointment at Essendon, but I like his [Lloyd's] CV - in as much as he's been around footy for a long time, he's done psychology, and he's coached under probably the hardest task master in the business in Ross Lyon and he's been able to survive that."
