Craig McRae and Sam Mitchell have the chance to join an illustrious list if they can make it three straight wins to start their coaching careers this weekend.

Only five first-time coaches – excluding those taking caretaker roles - have started their tenures with a hat-trick of victories since 2000.

However, if McRae's Magpies beat Geelong on Saturday night or Mitchell's Hawks take care of Carlton on Sunday, the premiership players will make that list a little longer.

It's fair to say a few men that started with three straight victories were handed more talented lists than both McRae and Mitchell.

Chris Scott has a streak that's going to be hard to top, winning 13 straight matches when he took over from Mark Thompson at Geelong ahead of 2011.

While Scott was given the keys to the back-end of a Cats' dynasty, fresh off the relative 'failure' of a preliminary final loss in 2010, his performance to get beyond the season's mid-point before suffering a loss was truly remarkable.

The next best streak belongs to Ken Hinkley.

After serving as an apprentice at both Geelong and Gold Coast, Hinkley stepped into the post-Matt Primus era at Port and made an immediate impact.

Taking over a team that finished 14th with just five wins in 2012, Hinkley started in a blaze, winning five on the trot to set the Power up for an unlikely finals appearance.

West Coast's Adam Simpson also started strongly when filling the huge boots of John Worsfold, winning his first three in 2014 after the Eagles had finished 13th the previous year.

Thompson (at Geelong in 2000) and the late Phil Walsh (at Adelaide in 2015) are the other coaches to begin their careers with a hat-trick of wins.

For Sydney and North Melbourne fans, John Longmire (2011) and Dani Laidley (2003) went agonisingly close to joining the exclusive list. Both suffered their first losses in round four, but their first three games reaped two wins and a draw, rather than three victories.