People familiar with my philosophy will know that I put less stock in wins than most people. The binary nature – you either take everything or get nothing – means that a simple win-loss record is not a particularly nuanced and, unless you have a very long timeframe to work with, doesn’t necessarily reflect teams’… Read More Primer – SCWP
WCL is a means of estimating the probability of a team winning a rugby league match at a given point in the game. The WCL system finds all instances of a given margin at a given point in the game in that league and calculates how often a team in that position won the game.… Read More Primer – WCL
A big thank you to Lorna Brown (@_Lorna_Brown) who provided me with the dataset and whose ongoing updates to the same mean that we should be able to do some form of Super League player analysis. She has – presumably through some sort of black magic and/or competence with programming – managed to scrape a… Read More Primer – Rismans
Previously in our “Peter V’landys sucks” series: **** At 10.25am on Thursday, 20 May 2021, the NRL issued a press release. The National Rugby League (NRL) today releases the below data of key football and fatigue related indicators in the game and corrects some misconceptions about the changes in the game over the last two… Read More This is getting embarrassing
Peter V’Landys and his team have already floated a lot of ideas to improve the NRL this year, a competition so obviously broken beyond repair that only their special skillset could fix it. The ideas are always frustratingly vague, lacking in details beyond one or two keywords, and there is never an explanation as to… Read More A guide to current ARLC policy for the NRL
This season, the NRL marketing department has decided to run with the tagline “faster and more unpredictable than ever” in one of its ads. Putting aside the fact that this is the blandest possible declaration that the NRL stands for nothing (indeed, tacitly endorses the racist view that a black man with an Aboriginal flag… Read More NRL 2021: faster and more unpredictable than ever
Regular readers will know that I like to keep up with all the developments in world football, not just the top level. Because so many second and third class comps were cancelled last year, we aren’t able to do a serious season preview for each one in 2021 (if I even had the time). Many… Read More A Shallow Dive into the minor rugby leagues in 2021
You’ve read me wank on about the second Brisbane team, anti-siphoning legislation, Super League reform, the state of the international game, other sports, my usual critical schtick and award voting systems but now it’s time to talk about actual football. The numbers have been run, in largely the same fashion as last year, and the… Read More A Deep Dive in to the 2021 NRL season
Wait, haven’t we done this before? Absolutely, in a post that hasn’t aged super-well, I replaced the Dally Ms with the old player rating system to assess the best player in each season. That system has been improved upon with TPR and WARG, so the conclusions drawn there can be safely discarded. Today, I specifically… Read More The Dally Ms are a wank, let’s use…something else
It’s BiG bRaIn EsSaY week on pythagonrl.com. I’ve written a series of approximately 75% thought-out, unpolished essays about somewhat obvious and/or somewhat unhinged things that probably belong on The Roar but I’ve decided to use my own platform to get off my chest. I occassionally get the urge to write a grand unifying theory of… Read More Big brain essay #5: Do these guys actually know what they’re doing?
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