I jumped the gun not long after the World Cup draw in early 2020 and ran some Monte Carlo simulations of how the tournament might unfold (it was exactly as you’d expect at the time). Then a pandemic happened and a rain of shit followed. The parochial cowards that make up the NRL clubs forced… Read More A Deep Dive into the 2021* Men’s Rugby League World Cup
It’s been about four years since I wrote the primer about using simulations. I haven’t called it the Stocky since early in 2018 and I use a completely different set of metrics as inputs, so it’s time to have a more up-to-date reference point. The purpose of simulations is to use the magic of random… Read More Primer – Sims
From earlier in the year: The squad itself isn’t magic but should be better than last place. New signing Isaac Luke has always been a productive player but he will presumably be second fiddle to Cameron McInnes when he returns from injury, reducing the potential volume of work Luke could be doing. Indeed, St George… Read More A Shallow Dive into the 2020 St George Illawarra Dragons
When a coach arrives at a major league club, fresh and excited to make his own mark in the history books, you’d have to think that, as a minimum threshold for success, he’d want to leave the place in better shape than when he arrived. Sometimes, the vagaries of reality make it difficult to assess… Read More The coaches that fucked up your club
Despite being an avowed radical when it comes to rugby league culture – best encapsulated as “burn it all down and guillotine those that disagree” – I can see why the Challenge Cup has appeal. Running a format similar to that of the much more famous FA Cup, there’s something between the destructive chaos wrought… Read More The Challenge Cup in 2020
This article is about the northern hemisphere rugby league competition. For the short-lived southern hemisphere competition, see the League Digest podcast. To complement the complete histories of the NRL and the Queensland Cup, I humbly present the complete history of the northern hemisphere Super League competition. I will also, at no charge to you, include… Read More A Complete History of Super League
After a dominating win over Great Britain, followed by a tough and exciting win over Australia, some extremely exuberant pundits decided that Tonga were the best nation in the world and worthy of Tier 1 status. Putting aside the fact that a poor island nation of 100,000 is not capable of generating enough native talent… Read More Tonga are still a long shot for the 2021 World Cup
If you’re not interested in how the rankings work and just want to see the outputs, click here. It began as a simple exercise to try and rate Super League players, much in the way that I rate NRL and Queensland Cup players. It turns out that the Super League website makes that an impossible… Read More Ranking every rugby league team in the world
The current format of the NRL doesn’t allow for each team to play each other twice. Doing that would mean extending the season by another six weeks and, even if they players were up for that (which they are not), as an armchair analyst, I don’t think I could cope. This means that not every… Read More Who has the softest NRL draw in 2019?
Updated on the back of last year’s successful use of graphs to convey the historical progress of NRL clubs, this year’s complete history now includes the stats and Eratosthenes movements from the 2018 season for each club.
Pythago NRL 