Tag Archives: class

A Complete History of the NRL (nerd edition)

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Last year, I did a report on each NRL club featuring a bit of history, a few statistics and some graphs. The series didn’t do super well in terms of clicks but also didn’t take a lot of effort to produce.

One thing I did enjoy putting together were the class graphs. These use a slow moving Elo rating system called Eratosthenes to track the long term performance of clubs. You can see a full listing of all current ratings here.

If you’ve got the right kind of stuff between your ears (that is, if you’re a massive nerd), each picture tells each team’s thousands of words history in the NRL. To that end, I’ve updated all sixteen clubs’ graphs to the end of the 2017 season for your nerdy consumption.

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Predicting this year’s NRL premiership winner with class

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Can we predict a premiership winner from their Elo ratings?

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Obviously, yes. That’s what the Stocky is for and this site would pointless if this was not true. But what if we wanted to look into the future before a single game has been played? I think that the Elo ratings of premiership winning teams might have a common pattern to them that show up if we take a closer look at their long term performance, or class, ratings with Eratosthenes.

We’ll need some premiership winners to review. To do this analysis I’ve tried to pick one premiership per club (to avoid autocorrelation) and pick a premiership that stands on its own. That eliminated a number of premierships years for Melbourne and multiple premierships for Manly and Brisbane. I also biased it towards more recent premiers where possible. I was left with the following list:

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Club Report – Melbourne Storm

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mel-badgeBackground

The Melbourne Storm were founded in 1998, in the immediate aftermath of the Super League-ARL dispute. Getting a team in Melbourne was a priority for Newscorp in order to expand the footprint of the game.

Early financial concessions meant that the Storm won their first premiership in only their second season in 1999. Thereafter, more sustained success arrived, with three minor premierships in a row from 2006 to 2008, four grand finals in a row from 2006 to 2009 and two premierships in 2007 and 2009. Melbourne, and rivals Manly, were the most dominant teams of this period. It all came apart in 2010 when massive salary cap rorts were uncovered. The Storm were stripped of the minor and major premierships from the 2006 to 2009 period and lost all their competition points in 2010, ensuring the club’s only wooden spoon.

The Storm bounced back quickly, winning a legitimate minor premiership in 2011 and a premiership in 2012. Since then, they’ve kept winning with two more minor premierships in 2016 and 2017. There’s not a lot of superlatives left to describe the Storm – even their cheating was monumental and they’ve had more NRL titles stripped than most clubs have won – and the 2017 team could make an excellent case for being the best vintage produced in the last twenty years.

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Club Report – Sydney Roosters

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syd-badgeBackground

Founded in 1908 as Eastern Suburbs, the Sydney Roosters are one of rugby league’s longest standing clubs. Playing out of Allianz Stadium, the Roosters (or Easts or City or Tricolours or Chooks) are one of the NRL’s success stories, having won thirteen premierships and nineteen minor premierships in their long history.

More recently, Easts have been one of the most successful of the Sydney based clubs, winning three minor premierships in a row from 2013 through 2015, including a premiership in 2013, and were a powerhouse in the early 2000s, winning the premiership in 2002. The club has attracted a large number of stars over the years, including Brad Fittler, Adrian Lam, Arthur Beetson, Ron Coote, Anthony Minichello, Craig Fitzgibbon, the original immortal Dally Messenger and some gronks like Mitchell Pearce and Todd Carney.

Sydney maintain a close rivalry with Souths that is the subject of the Ron Coote Cup.

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Club Report – Wests Tigers

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wst-badgeBackground

Wests Tigers have won one premiership. The year was 2005 and a young Benji Marshall side-stepped an entire league to lead his team to an extremely unlikely victory over grand final debutants, the North Queensland Cowboys. The Tigers had finished the regular season in fourth, behind the Eels, Broncos and Dragons.

The Tigers were formed in 2000 from a merger of the Western Suburbs Magpies, a team the NSWRL had been trying to get rid of for years, and the Balmain Tigers. The resulting joint venture has struggled for success beyond their fairytale year but never have hit the rock bottom of receiving a wooden spoon. It’s been six years since the Tigers featured in the finals and a year or two of re-building is ahead before they may make another appearance.

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Club Report – Canberra Raiders

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cbr-badgeBackground

What a team the Canberra Raiders were in the early 1990s. As one of the NSWRL’s first expansion teams in 1982, the Raiders made five grand finals between 1987 and 1994 (that’s seven years!). Of those five grand finals, Canberra won three of them in 1989, 1990 and 1994. Jason Croker, Mal Meninga, Ricky Stuart, Laurie Daley, Brett Mullins, Gary Belcher, Glenn Lazarus, Craig Bellamy, Tim Sheens – the list of top players in those premiership winning sides is almost endless.

Since then, it’s been a whole lot of nothing. The Raiders have been poor but not so bad that they even find themselves at the bottom of the ladder. 2016 was a year of redemption, finishing second on the ladder, the momentum of which they have blown throughout the 2017 season and they will be lucky to make the finals.

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Club Report – Cronulla Sharks

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cro-badgeBackground

Cronulla won a premiership. You might have heard about it. It was last year. It was also their first since joining the NSWRL premiership in 1967.

The Sharks are also the only team stupid enough to recently get caught in a doping scandal. In the NRL, you’d basically have to leave a box of used syringes with a note saying what was in them on the front doorstep of NRL House and I’m still not sure the authorities would put two and two together. To get pinged for peptide use while not even being good enough to make the finals in 2013 and 2014 is a level of dumbassery unsurpassed in the sport of rugby league.

That aside, prior to those incidents, Cronulla were a journeyman’s team. They were never terrible (only three wooden spoons to their name, two from the early days and one in 2014) but never great (refer lack of premierships, 1967-2015). The Sharks were the home of some top class individuals, including Andrew Ettinghausen, Steve Rogers, Brett Kimmorley and David Peachey. Their current line-up features stars, including Valentine Holmes, and also features some guys that have contributed to multiple Origin losses, like Paul Gallen, James Maloney and Andrew Fifita.

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