Tag Archives: nsw cup

It’s not just the six again

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The move to do away with the ‘unlimited’ tackle rule that had been played in Australia for 59 seasons was the brainchild of the urbane secretary of the Rugby Football League in England, Bill Fallowfield. The move was designed to counter what Jack McNamara in the Manchester Evening News described as the ‘evils of the almost never-ending possession’. In both countries, a grinding, physical style of play had developed, with teams holding possession for long periods. Australian centre Bob Hagan… told of a game in which Huddersfield kicked off against Hull Kingston Rovers, and then touched the ball only twice in the first half. Hagan reckons it was this game that killed off the old rule.

Centenary of Rugby League (2008), Ian Heads and David Middleton

In the late 1950s, rugby league faced a problem. It was boring. Teams could hold the ball indefinitely and, using the favoured tactic of one out hit-ups, could maintain possession provided they didn’t make an error or do something silly like scoring.

The problem identified, a radical solution was borrowed from American football to introduce a ‘use it or lose it’ ethos to the game. Initially limiting possession to four tackles, and extended to six in 1971 in New South Wales (and later elsewhere), the new rule was trialled in pre-season competitions to test its impacts. The new rule had its detractors and the style of football it spawned was chaotic – dubbed “panic football” – but better than it had been. It forced teams to attack. Four tackles didn’t seem to provide enough time, so six tackles became the solution. The game was better for it.

The NRL website has every Sydney grand final from 1966 onwards and if you watch them like I have, you can see the evolution from unlimited possession to four tackle and then six tackles in the space of a few hours.

The key thing here is the process. A problem is identified. A solution is proposed. The solution is tested and evaluated outside of the main premiership. If successful at resolving the initial problem, the solution is implemented. The solution is adjusted as required in response to feedback

This is the basic framework of common sense decision making. Further, it is evidence that the sport of rugby league collectively and consciously decided it was not a game that valued possession of a football but one that valued attacking play and, as perhaps an unintended consequence, became a game of field position

Rugby league has a history of making these rule changes – introducing the play the ball and reducing from 15 to 13 a side in 1906, reducing the points value of goals in 1897 and increasing the points value of tries in 1983, introducing and then gradually increasing the offside rule over the years – to support the scoring of tries, considered the most interesting part of the game.

As it currently stands, the set restart will not be joining that pantheon of innovative rule changes.

The governing bodies for Queensland, NSW, French, PNG and British rugby leagues, as well as the international board, have all joined the Australian body in adopting the set restart. The rule sets still aren’t completely harmonised – the two point field goal remains an Australian-only feautre as far as I can tell, scrums are used at fewer points (or not at all) to restart play in England and the rules are different again for the women’s game for some reason – but largely everyone is now on the same page after Peter V’Landys, Project Apollo and the ARLC unilaterally changed the sport of rugby league during the 2020 covid off-season.

As more time passes, and the NRL bogs down into a mire of repeated blowout scorelines, it becomes clear what the sport has decided to sign itself up for. In a sense, it continues the tradition of attacking play but it appears to be decidedly one way. Concerningly, even as fewer six agains are called, the blowouts remain.

Worse still, the sport seems to have regressed more than half a century to being a matter of possession. Phil Lutton put together a fantastic piece in the SMH on the rule changes that, somewhat novelly, involved speaking to the actual players to see what they thought was happening, instead of merely regurgitating talking points from the administration. I believe this is called journalism.

The truly fascinating thing about is that these well-paid professional athletes cannot explain precisely what’s happening. This is not a reflection on them but rather reflects the complexity of the problem the NRL faces.

We can see the obvious. There are a lot of games decided in 2020 and moreso in 2021 by larger scorelines than we are used to. We can watch the games and see that if one team has a noticeable advantage after ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, then it won’t be long before they race out to a twenty point lead and it’s game by half time. The second forty minutes is effectively irrelevant. I’ve written about the subltety of the impact on the game before but do you really need any more evidence than this?

Previously, I compared the impacts of the rule changes to that of climate change. It’s small, it’s consistent and there are other things hapenning but it’s there. Some people’s complete inability to parse this reality – that several things can happen simultaneously to affect an outcome – leaves me baffled on a regular basis, however, if a substantial population seem to have an unbending love of simple, monocausal explanations for the complexities of the world, that does seem to explain much of history.

Not every game is a blowout, just as each day is not necessarily hotter than the last, but the data paints a picture of the overall situation that is as alarming as it is obvious. To repeat bullshit talking points about development, pathways, roster management and whatever else is insulting to the collective intelligence of the NRL fanbase. If anything, the complete absence of any thorough explanation of how the sport’s mechanics actually work on the field belies the idea that rugby league is a simple game for simple people (a subscription to Rugby League Writers will dispell that notion for you) and yet simple people insist on talking as if it were so.

Confounding this further is the abject refusal of the same blowouts afflicting the NRL to turn up in Super League, which adopted the six again after their own covid break in 2020, or either State Cup, which implemented the six again at the start of this season.

To unpack this, we’re going to have to go back to first principles.

Embed from Getty Images

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I wrote about how this all came about in June of 2020 and managed to reasonably well predict most of what’s happened since. I was wrong about the impact on margins (that only became clear later) but otherwise, the cliff notes follow.

The suspension of the 2020 season due to the coronavirus pandemic put the NRL in breach of contract with its free-to-air broadcast partner, Nine. Nine, a relic in a dying industry, felt that it had overpaid for the rights to the NRL and Origin and used this opportunity to make the NRL take a significant cut to its broadcast revenue while forcing the NRL to bring in changes that would make the game more entertaining, thereby increasing Nine’s ratings. Australian netball did somethinig similar at the behest of Nine.

The NRL introduced packages of rule changes between the 2019 and 2020 seasons, between the first two rounds and remainder of the 2020 season and then another between the 2020 and 2021 seasons. These changes tend to all be lumped together and include the captain’s challenge, reducing from two to one referee, the set restart for ruck infringements and later offside, a reduction in scrums but greater flexibility in how they are used, the 20/40 and the two point field goal for attempts beyond the 40m line.

The changes made under the V’Landys regime, most of the above, were sold on the basis that it would improve the pace of the game, the flow of the game, bring back fatigue to the game, which would allow the little man to flourish. All of this was deemed to be more entertaining, taking us back to a time of purer, less robotic football.

When the changes were first premiered, on 28 May as Parramatta defeated Brisbane 34-6, it was clear that panic football had returned after lying dormant for half a century. As the weeks progressed, it was not at all clear to me that the product was better but there was definitely more of it and I was told by the media, breathlessly and relentlessly, that it was better.

Ratings for the first two weeks of the resumed competition were record breaking. The dogshit defence of the Broncos was seen by more than 1.3 million people. But after a few weeks, ratings fell back into their usual rhythm and while the season seemed to finish with improved overall ratings, it was on fewer games and the big four matches of the grand final and State of Origin were well down on previous years.

This season, we’ve seen Origin bounce back a little, leading to suggestions that its ratings are up, which is true as long as you don’t look at what the ratings were five years ago. For the regular season, ratings seem to be down but not significantly enough that you wouldn’t be able to point to streaming and make up some stuff about historically bad teams to explain it. If the on-field product is leading to people turning off their TVs, it hasn’t been significant enough that the NRL won’t be able to duck and weave taking any responsibility for what’s happening.

All of this leads us to the inevitable question: what was the point?

I understand that one must occassionally suffer in the short term, in order to gain in the long term. The penalty crackdown in 2018 was a perfect example. In principle, we simply had to ensure a few months of penalty-ridden games to ensure that players and coaches understood that the “wrestle” would not be tolerated and the game would then speed up. Players and coaches knew that the administration did not have the stomach for it, nor for the fight in the media, and would buckle eventually. Sure enough, the administration did and we watched a lot of penalties get awarded for nothing.

This is the opposite. If there isn’t a clear goal to be achieved, as I suspect the current administration does not know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it, then why do we need to suffer? None of the rules supporters seem to be able to answer that question, preferring to deflect onto a Victorian bootstraps philosophy that every team simply must do better.

Ratings are, at best, flat and, at worst, down. That rather suggests that the rules haven’t had their intended impact. If the rules don’t serve their ostensible purpose – to entertain and to increase the audience – then there shouldn’t be anything that stops the NRL from rolling them back. There seems little point in “tweaking” the rule changes to mitigate the worst outcomes because the game is less entertaining and no more popular than it was previously.

As it stands, we have had to sit through a lot of terrible football for no gain.

The problem is how to unravel what’s been done. I don’t think it is as simple as getting rid of the set restart.

*****

I’ve got to say, even with the blow-outs the games are entertaining.

Before they were robotic, they were predictable. Now, they’re entertaining. Even the blowouts over the weekend were entertaining. For the viewer.

Peter V’Landys, 17 May 2021 (Poor roster management, not faster game, to blame for growing number of blowouts: V’landys, WWOS)

Teams that have adapted well to the new game don’t seem to mind where they start their sets. Using fast play-the-balls, a reliance on metre-eating backs gaining ground early in the set and a narrow passing game to add just enough variation to keep the defence guessing, they are able to keep their attacking line moving fast enough to regularly cover the best part of a length of the field in a set. The threat of the six again is enough to keep poorly organised defensive lines scrambling, unwilling to risk sitting in the ruck too long and extending the time that they have to defend. Ironically, this plays exactly into the better teams’ hands

Should the weaker team survive the set and regain possession, the well adapted teams are flying off the line and pinning down their opponents. This increases pressure on the team with the ball, forcing them to accept a paltry gain on their set or forcing them into an error, either from an ill-advised pass or from the sheer impact of defensive line.

Now the better team has field position and the ball. From there, any team with a competent halfback should be able to string together two or three repeat sets. Failing that, they can rely on their defensive linespeed to crush the opposition until they have had enough attacking opportunities to put points on the board. Then they get the ball back from kick-off.

And that’s it. Fifteen minutes of this and most teams crack – good and bad. Players do not have the aerobic engines to compete at that intensity for long and the poorer teams do not have the defensive structures to resist. Once the players are gassed, it’s trivial for the team with the upper hand to start running through and over teams no longer able to organise themselves or make tackles. Once they’re up by twenty, it’s game over but unfortunately, there’s often up to an hour still to go.

It gets worse later in the game when the fatigue causes handling errors, turning the ball back over and resulting in more energy-sapping defence, leading to a negative feedback loop whose destination is a blown out scoreline. On the rare occassions where the losing team manages to string a set or two together, they are too fatigued to run with any intensity. It becomes laughably easy to defend their insipid attacks. In desperation and running on empty, their fifth tackle options fall apart as players de-sychronise their timing, lose cohesion and begin to rely on individuals going it alone.

In short, once you are on the backfoot, you start to play a lot like the 2020 Brisbane Broncos. More often than not, you lose like them too.

What you may notice is that nowhere in that platonic ideal of the NRL in 2021 was the team with the upper hand awarded a set restart. Indeed, it was at most the threat of a set restart that got defensive teams scrambling. This, I think, explains why Penrith can have a positive set restart difference and Melbourne can have a negative difference and both can completely dominate the competition.

You might then be wondering what the difference is between 2019 and 2021. Isn’t this just a description of good rugby league gameplay? The answer is yes but also no. The differences are subtle and mostly rooted in the rule changes that have been brought in.

Relieving penalties are a thing of the past, replaced by the set restart. Bad teams relied on these penalties being awarded, sometimes seemingly at random, as a means to get a lift down the field, an opportunity take a breath and reset their organisation or to score an easy two points with another possession to follow.

This shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. It’s how the game has been played for more than a hundred years. Importantly, it interrupts the otherwise continuous possession of the better team and offers a foothold for the weaker team to work their way back into the game. Otherwise, the better team knows it has the ability to move the ball as required to score points, they simply need to hold the ball until the lesser team cracks. As Phil Lutton put it:

This style of play, with its heavy emphasis on holding possession in lieu of gaining field position, wasn’t possible previously because the conditions that allow it to exist weren’t in place.

The reduction from two on-field referees to one has had huge and completely unexplored implications. Most of the discourse at the time of the change was about working rights. The ARLC gave some token concessions and since then, the referees have shut up and gotten on with it. The problem is that between halving the number of referees and the increased pace of play, the referees are now worse at their jobs.

This is the genesis of the debacle of the high shot crackdown. High shots that were obvious enough on TV were being missed on field because the referees, like the players, were gassed and looking for too many things. That crackdown, like all of its previous editions, was quietly shelved when it turned out it was poorly thought through and ruining the spectacle of the game even moreso than the blowouts. The solution seems to have been more Bunker involvement, which I’m fairly certain was decried by segments of the media a few years ago but goes unremarked in V’Landys’ NRL. If they haven’t already, the referees are going to reach overload.

Under a two referee system, one referee set the line and the other policed the ruck. Under a one referee system, one referee does both jobs but neither of them well. The better teams are able to get off the mark a few tenths of a second earlier because the referee’s attention is elsewhere and that’s enough to get to the opposition slightly sooner and hit slightly harder. The cumulative effect starts to hurt after a while.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ball, teams like the Panthers can simply lie in the ruck, either waiting for a signal from the referee or their teammates to get up. If the wrestle has been eliminated, it’s been replaced with an even more blatant ruck infringement, largely daring the referees to blow a penalty that will never come. Instead, a lesser punishment in the form of a set restart may come, and the Panthers will simply shrug their shoulders and set their line, confident in the knowledge that their defence can withstand the insipid, exhausted attack of their opposition.

Considering all of this, I believe any attempts to tweak the rules, to apply another band-aid, are misguided. The suggestions to date will not disrupt this paradigm. One common one is to re-adopt the Super League rule and let the scoring team kick off. This would prevent the scoring team from regaining possession immediately after scoring but merely delays the inevitable. If the better teams can move the ball 70 metres downfield in a set, more if they get a set restart, and can manipulate the other team to dominate possession for an extended period, then we are back to square one.

Giving penalties in your own half and giving set restarts while in the attacking half doesn’t help either. Penalty goals are a key means for lesser teams with weak attacks to keep within touching distance of their opposition. By effectively eliminating the penalty goal from the game, you force weaker teams to attack the line. Penrith, who currently have the best defensive record of any Australian club of the last twenty years, would simply laugh.

In a season with a record number of shutouts, this isn’t going to redress the balance. Weaker teams need tools to keep their opposition within reach and to be able to work themselves back into the game, as they did 1895 through 2019. Without that, the blowouts will continue.

While we’ve examined one factor in detail but there are many at play and it would take a thesis to unpack everything. Some of the teams currently playing are simply bad at football and could probably stand to improve. But the teams on the wrong end of pastings have included the pre-season favourites and the club that won two premierships in 2018 and 2019. At the other end of the ladder, the Bulldogs have already won more games than the 2016 Knights and aren’t conceding anywhere near as many points as the 1999 Magpies. There’s always been bad teams but there’s never been scorelines like this. Not against good and bad teams. Not in a wet La Niña year. Not in a salary capped, full-time professional league. Not when it’s been fourteen years since the last expansion team entered the competition.

However, like breaking the four minute mile, the ceiling of what’s possible in rugby league has been raised and, even if the old rule set was reinstated, elements of the new style of play would remain. Unless the game is slowed down, it may well remain a game of possession. While I’m normally in favour of pushing the barriers of what’s humanly possible, we can only speculate as to where this might lead the sport over the coming years.

*****

So why don’t we see these blowouts in other leagues?

Despite the margin heading higher but not exceeding previous year, there’s signs in the English game. The closest game in round 12 was a forfeit. Round 8 had the fourth highest margin in Super League history. St Helens are currently conceding points at just 7.6 points per game, better even than Penrith and the best in Europe since Wigan in the 1986-87 season. The league leading attack of Warrington is less impressive, merely being the best since the 2017 Tigers. Salford’s attack has only been good for 11.5 points per game, the least since 2-23 Swinton in 1991-92. Leigh’s 0-12 record speaks for itself and their 39.1 points conceded per game is the seventh worst in the entire history of English rugby league dating back to 1895, sitting behind six Super League teams who managed to combine for 15 wins and 2 draws from 155 matches.

In Queensland Cup, Wynnum’s 34.0 points scored per game and 18.2 points conceded per game are only 16th and 52nd best marks in that competition. The Capras’ 16.1 points scored per game and the Cutters’ 33.6 points conceded per game are 26th and 27th worst, respectively. In all, it seems rather balanced. Despite this, the two leading teams each have more competition points than the bottom five combined, which includes three unaffiliated clubs.

It may just be that not enough set restarts have been called for it to be a sufficiently significant threat to fluster teams even in the absence of the six again call.

But we see a similar decline in penalties awarded.

Albeit, in percentage terms, it’s less significant in state cups than the NRL. Comparing the average penalties across 2016 to 2019 to the number called in 2021, 52% of penalties have been eliminated in NRL, compared to only 33% in Queensland Cup and 44% in NSW Cup.

It may be that in these leagues, the players aren’t athletic or skilled or coached well enough to implement the strategies used by Melbourne and Penrith in the NRL. Most of the NRL – and the Queensland Maroons, for that matter – haven’t come to grips with it yet, so it’s questionable whether we would have expected reserve graders to have mastered the new game. It may be that the spread of talent across the leagues is greater than the NRL and the effects are concealed within the typically higher scoring. It could be that Super League never adopted the second referee and state cup did so only sporadically and so the “change” back to one ref has had comparatively less impact on those competitions.

It may, as in the NRL and Super League in 2020, take time for the changes to fully percolate through. It will be worth watching other leagues to see how they adapt to the play on a year’s delay. More data should help isolate what’s happening and prove or disprove any hypotheses.

It is, as I said, complicated.

*****

Rugby league is an entirely artificial space. There is no natural order. We can decide what we want to see and there is no reason why would should have implemented these rules. They do not serve their intended purpose and the second order impacts, unknown at the time of implementation due to a lack of trialling, have made the NRL demonstrably worse.

Any defence of the rule changes starts with the presumption that they need to remain and only require modification but this flies in the face of the common sense decision making framework used previous administrators to improve the game. We must ask ourselves what purpose the changes were meant to serve, if that’s been accomplished and if not and what reasoning there is to continue with it. If the goal was to punish teams for losing, then it’s mission accomplished but if the goal was to entertain, it’s been sadly lacking.

The concern is that in a World Cup year, assuming it goes ahead at all, will see minnows will face off against Australian and New Zealander sides principally comprising players from Penrith and Melbourne. If full time professionals get blown off the park by these players, what hope is there for nations whose teams are made up of part timers and amateurs? It could get ugly and it will be embarrassing and it will reflect the shortage of common sense decision making at all levels of rugby league adminstration.

But until someone smarter than me works out what’s really going on, the best we can hope is the World Cup is refereed as the lower tiers of the sport are and hope that the next round of band-aid solutions, rumoured to already be in the works, somehow fixes the problem by accident.

Primer – WCL

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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. For example, if 60% of teams who had a 6 point lead after 24 minutes, then we take that to mean that a team who has a 6 point lead after 24 minutes has a 60% chance of winning the game. From this we can build up in-game win probability charts, not unlike those you might have seen on Five Thirty Eight or similar.

It’s that simple. I have used some averaging to smooth out rough edges in the dataset (especially for odd-numbered margins) and where there are too few games in the sample that the model’s results do not make sense, I have edited some of these manually. For example, a one point lead from half time through 60 minutes into the game should not have a less than 50% win probability for the leading team but it apparently does in the NRL.

Note that 100% is only achieved at full time; the remainder of the game is never more than 99.9%. Even though this is not visible, it reflects the reality that our dataset does not cover all available possibilities.

While I could build a more sophisticated model that includes all sorts of other elements, I wanted a basic means to gauge the in-game win probability based on the scoreboard. I do not care what the pre-game odds are and I do not care about the “momentum” or other states of the game. The model is blind to the teams playing and is entirely dependent on the margin and time on clock.

WCL has no overall predictive power but it can graphically summarise a game quite well with a layer of information that simply plotting the margin does not. The sum of team’s win probability percentages at each minute of the game gives a WCL score, which is indicative of how dominant the team has been. A tight game will have each team’s score close to zero, while a perfectly dominant game will have the winning team’s score close to 50 and the loser’s close to -50.

There are separate WCL datasets for NRL, NSW Cup and Qld Cup, based on all matches from 2016 to date. There’s also a generalised men’s WCL set, which is the combination of all three that should be suitable for representative games that would otherwise have too small a sample size to work with or Super League should the need arise. I have been collecting NRLW and QRLW event data as well but there are too few games to form a proper dataset.

WCL stands for Worm Chess Lathe. Worm because the graphs resemble the worm from Australian TV political debates, which are meant to reflect audience responses live in real time. Chess and Lathe because the graphs sometimes resemble a chess piece in profile (bishops and queens, generally), as if it had been created with a wood lathe. The system needed a name and WCL is as good as any.

Generally speaking, this is for novelty purposes but it can also help us answer questions like the following –

Was Magic Round ruined by bins and send offs?

While we all enjoy the chaos of bins and send offs during live football, the fun does wear off somewhat after eight in two games, so yes. But were the game outcomes materially changed by the bins and send offs?

Ah! Well, nevertheless…

Some selected games of interest

Panthers vs Raiders, round 14, 2017

Raiders vs Warriors, round 3, 2018

Storm vs Panthers, grand final, 2020

Broncos vs Titans, round 8, 2021

A Shallow Dive into the minor rugby leagues in 2021

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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 of the players have been on the sidelines for simply too long and, where we have data, it is too old to be of real use.

Nonetheless, there were still movements in the off-season that are worth keeping an eye on and if you missed The Year in Rugby League Football, we’ll cover some old ground to provide context for the season ahead.

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Queensland Cup / Intrust Super Cup

If this is your first foray to the QCup, welcome. This is, without hyperbole, the world’s greatest rugby football league (Digicel Cup runs a close second). One game on Sunday will be available for streaming through the QRL website, as well as a few other outlets, with a Saturday game on Kayo Freebies. While its frustrating to lose the free-to-air slot that’s been made available the last few years (which presumably happened because Phil Gould tells Peter V’Landys what to do and Gould couldn’t find Queensland on a map, much less acknowledge the value that the Queensland Cup does and could have), this theoretically makes the competition much more accessible. At some point, we hope the QRL can go its own way with its own broadcast rights and reduce its dependence on the clueless Sydney-based parasites.

The biggest change for this season is Redcliffe’s switch from being the Broncos’ primary feeder to the Warriors’, which I wrote about last year. As usual, unless a transcedent talent emerges (e.g. Harry Grant in 2019, Cameron Munster and Jason Taumalolo in 2013, etc), the main front runners will be the clubs that get the best players from their NRL affiliates. Typically this will be Redcliffe (Warriors), Wynnum-Manly (Broncos, maybe Souths Logan or Norths), Townsville (Cowboys, although their assignments are relatively balanced), two-year defending champions Burleigh (Titans) and either Sunshine Coast or Easts (Storm).

My money is on the latter, given most of the first-rate Storm talents have been assigned to the Falcons but won’t generally be available. Easts Tigers have also rebranded as the Brisbane Tigers and signed former Souths Logan coach, Jon Buchanan, to replace Terry Matterson, who has taken up a role at the Broncos. They also pinched Darren Nicholson from the Magpies and have snaffled up Mitch Frei and former Jet Michael Purcell. I’d say they are having a serious tilt at ending their premiership drought which extends back to 1991 (post-Broncos BRL), 1989 (post-Broncos Winfield State League), 1983 (pre-Broncos BRL but season split with the Winfield State League) and/or 1978 (legit BRL title), depending on your perspective. Either way, like Parramatta, they’ve never won a title that matters despite five QCup grand final appearances since 1996.

Souths have signed up Steven Bretherton to coach for 2021 and 2022 and Karmichael Hunt and Kevin Locke will be appearing for the black-and-whites (and-blue-and-golds) with Tom Dearden if the Broncos decide they don’t want him for some insane reason.

Even after watching the Digicel Cup highlights from last year, it’s difficult to say whether the Hunters will materially improve on 2019’s wooden spoon as part of their post-2017 rebuild, citing a mix of new and old players, including the immortal Ase Boas and the temporary services of Watson Boas, who is unable to rejoin Doncaster. I fully expect the Capras, who currently do not have a coach, to be bringing up the rear as usual. Norths have signed Danny Levi, the perfect replacement level NRL player.

For 2020, I did do a deep dive season preview which was made redundant within about two weeks thanks to this thing you might have heard of called the Novel Coronavirus. A year on, with no play in between, a lot of the information I have from the 2019 season is redundant now. On top of that, the rule changes brought in last year have only just filtered through to State Cup (no word on whether 2021 rules will also be adopted this year). The reality is that we will not know how clubs and players have come through until we have some games in the books.

QRLW / BHP Premiership

We didn’t get much of a chance to get to know the new QRLW competition, suspended after one round in 2020. The BHP Premiership will kick off on April 10 2021, a few weeks after the men’s competition. Eight teams, largely the same as last year, will compete: Brisbane Tigers, Burleigh Bears, Wests Panthers, Central Queensland Capras, North Queensland Gold Stars, Valleys Diehards, Tweed Heads Seagulls and Souths Logan Magpies. It is great to see two heritage clubs returning to second class football, as neither Wests nor Valleys have played in the Queensland Cup since 2003 and 2004, respectively, and the latter was part of a short-lived joint venture with Brothers.

Ali Brigginshaw has gone from Brothers Ipswich to Valleys, after Brothers declined to enter this year’s competition, where she will be coached by Scott Prince. Brigginshaw played for Souths Logan in the Holcim Cup last year. Tamika Upton has also moved on from Souths Logan, and previously the Capras, to Burleigh. Tarryn Aiken will suit up again for Tweed Heads. The rebalancing of the competition’s talent should narrow the gap between Burleigh and Souths Logan at one end, and Wests and Tweed at the other that was experienced during last year’s Holcim Cup.

It is genuinely difficult to know who will be good in the BHP Premiership. One of the most enjoyable aspects of watching this competition will be seeing who comes out on top and learning some new names along the way. The Bears and Magpies already had strong programmes. Valleys aren’t messing around. The Tigers have invested in theirs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Gold Stars, taking talent from Townsville, Cairns and Mackay, also field a competitive team. We’ll have to wait and see.

NSW Cup / Knock-on Effect Cup

Coincidentally, the Raiders made a last second decision to rejoin the NSW Cup shortly after Peter V’Landys announced he wanted all three grades back. For them, it’s probably a much smarter decision than the previous idea of using the Canberra Raiders Cup, i.e. local footy in Canberra, as reserve grade but has meant their withdrawal from some junior competitions.

With the exit of the Warriors, this brings the NSW Cup up to a beefy eleven teams, of which there are several heritage clubs – Newtown (Sharks), North Sydney (Roosters), Western Suburbs (Tigers) – and a couple of the bigger western Sydney clubs – Mounties (Bulldogs) and Blacktown (Sea Eagles) – and Canberra, Newcastle, Parramatta, Penrith, St George Illawarra and South Sydney just running straight reserve grade sides. For those playing at home, that’s five teams with distinct identities and six running with the “like the NRL but a bit shit” marketing angle.

The Cup is now sponsored by the Knock-on Effect which, depending on what mood I’m in, either sounds like a competition to make the most handling errors or raising awareness for CTE.

Trodden said it was fitting to extend the partnership with Transport for NSW after the success of The Knock-On Effect campaign, which aims to reduce road deaths and serious injuries on NSW roads.

Source

The strength of teams runs on how well their senior side goes. The Dragons were minor premiers in 2019 with a 13-6-3 record (Souths won more games but also lost more and finished one point behind) but the Jets won the grand final from seventh place thanks to reinforcements becoming available after the Sharks were knocked out of the NRL finals. I’d expect some of the deeper NRL teams, e.g. Raiders, Sharks and Rabbitohs, to be able to keep relatively talented players in the second tier, setting their sides up for strong seasons barring a crisis in first grade. The top eight (from eleven or twelve) finals system makes for total chaos so I won’t even pretend to know who might win the title.

Super League

Super League spent most of 2020 lurching from disaster to disaster, covering its blemishes and saving its graces with a blistering grand final. Not only did the league cut its brightest hope for a wider and more commercially viable future, it retreated further into its own backyard. Super League refused to cast a net as far as York, let alone London or Toulouse, and instead opted for Leigh, a club whose Super League record is 8-42-1 and is only a twenty minute drive to not one but three other Super League clubs.

Between the TV deal going down 25%, sponsorship paid in pizza and £750,000 reportedly spent on a private equity deal rejected by four clubs and the RFL, I’m not sure if Super League is a metaphor for Brexit or vice versa. A wider, Atlantic vision is just not happening because Rob Elstone is about as competent as Boris Johnson but without the sociopathic charisma.

Then again, he’s off, so we’ll see what his replacement brings. It is 2021 and a chance for the Northern Union to think about how to remake itself for the 21st century. They will absolutely not do that, instead preferring to focus on grimly holding on for dear life. In the meantime, there’s liable to be a football competition break out at any second. The start of the season has already been delayed, primarily due to the UK government’s Super League-esque handling of the pandemic, to March 11. Unlike in the lower divisions, Super League has a TV contract to fulfill, so will play with or without fans (expected to return sometime in May or June). Someone will eventually work out what to do with Catalans (and Toulouse), given current travel restrictions. Charter flights should solve the problem but one wonders how much money Bernard Gausch really has.

I briefly toyed with making this into a deep dive but unlike other editions, we don’t have player data to work with for Super League (the player stats on the SL website are an absolute mess) and I only track Elo ratings. The maths work out pretty much the same each season in any case. St Helens, Wigan and Warrington will lead the way, with one of the first two probably winning the grand final, although Wire are long overdue. There’s a constantly shuffling middle pack, comprising Leeds, Catalans, Salford, Hull FC, Castleford and Huddersfield whose fortunes will swing on how far they can get into the Challenge Cup as much as anything. The Rhinos should be aiming to rejoin the top tier clubs this year. At the end of the field, Wakefield Trinity, Hull KR and the re-branded Wolfpack / Leigh Centurions, will be struggling to avoid the drop.

Challenge Cup

The Challenge Cup is designed to be a bit of a crap-shoot but will likely be dominated by Super League teams in the latter stages, as it almost inevitably is. If a team falls out of contention in one comp but remains in the running in the other, they will swing resources to maximise their chances of winning something. 2021 could be a good year for a lesser light to break through at Wembley, a few teams in the middle tier have done in recent years. The RFL is using this opportunity to see what demand there is for streaming via Our League charging what are, quite frankly, outrageous prices.

£20, or about AU$36 at time of writing, would buy you two months of a basic Kayo sub, which is not limited to lower division rugby league football, while the QRL and NSWRL will broadcast games for free, as did the NRL with its pre-season trials in lieu of charging, wait for it,

$18 just to watch a pre season trial.

If the RFL’s and Super League’s audience buy into this en masse, they’re dumber than I thought. Our League will either be a roaring commercial success, built on extracting ever more shillings out of their C2DE audience, or a catastrophic failure, having priced out some of the biggest victims of Tory austerity. I’m sure it’ll be fine though.

Championship

Crowds will return in the near-ish future, which is good news for the Championship and League 1. They will not be forced to play behind closed doors for no revenue for long. The Championship will commence at the beginning of April with crowds returning sometime in May. Without much of a season played in 2020, we won’t know for sure how the teams will sort themselves out but all eyes will be on the promotion race out of the Championship.

It will be fiercely contested between London Broncos, Tolouse Olympique, York City Knights and perennial challenges, Featherstone Rovers. Out of those four, I don’t really care which one gets ahead as long as the promotion doesn’t stretch the club past its breaking point. Likely the best overall outcome for the game would be the ascension of Toulouse or, to a lesser extent, London, or a greater extent if they move to Plough Lane. The scenario of Featherstone being promoted at the expense of, say, Catalans would have sent me into an apoplectic fit not too long ago but I have decided to accept English football for what it is, especially after Rovers’ chairman blasted Super League for their handling of the Wolfpack fiasco.

Newcastle Thunder have been promoted to the Championship in the off-season, which with the aforementioned and Sheffield, gives the Championship a big city twist on the northern game. Hopefully, the Thunder can avoid the drop. A few signings should see them through, leaving the smaller traditional clubs to fight out the relegation battle. Halifax have adopted a new Panthers moniker and branding.

Elite 1

The Elite 1 season, which kicked off at the end of October in 2020, has continued through the pandemic, as a professional sport exempt from France’s ban. Quite how the clubs are generating revenue with no crowds and a minimal TV deal remains to be seen. Still, the Canaries, the Babys Dracs and the Sangliers lead the way after approximately eleven matchdays. There have been numerous cancellations/postponements due to positive tests, so it remains to be seen in what shape the season finishes.

The good news is that Elite 1 is apparently looking to expand from ten to twelve teams, promoting two out of Elite 2. It seems a little strange to me, given Palau, the last promoted team in 2013, and Toulouse Olympique’s reserve side, the former Toulouse Jules-Julien taken over in 2016, have struggled to compete in Elite 1. One questions whether the new clubs might similarly struggle. I also wonder if this weakens Elite 2 too much but perhaps it’s preferable for the FFR to put its eggs in the Elite 1 basket in hopes of breaking out of their rut and perhaps attracting a broadcaster.

Lyon and Toulon are baselessly speculated upon as being the best candidates for promotion, even as they languished at the bottom of the ladder in the previous shortened season and were not much better in the full season prior. Lyon, a large city well outside the French rugby league heartlands, and Toulon, a big rugby (of the Nazi kind) town, is perhaps indicative of the direction the new FFR President wants to take the game, even if the sporting merits aren’t there.

In the meantime, if you need a primer on French football, you can read this season preview I wrote pre-covid or listen to actual French or French-adjacent people explain it:

Elsewhere

  • Commencing in May, League 1 has been condensed down to just ten teams. Unless there’s been a miracle, West Wales and Coventry will continue to struggle, although one hopes the Raiders and Bears can win a few games each this year. The best rated teams are Doncaster, Workington Town and Barrow, although recent investment in Rochdale might turn them into competitors.
  • The Digicel Cup will return in 2021 with the same teams as in 2020. There were several expressions of interest to create new franchises but none were accepted by the PNGRFL. With the Hunters returning to the Queensland Cup and based in Queensland for the foreseeable future, some competitive balance should be restored, although I would expect Lae, Port Moresby and Hela to be the main contenders again. We can only hope it is this year that a broadcast deal is struck for Australia.
  • France’s Elite 2 2020-21 season was put on hold due to «la deuxieme vague» after only two rounds, with les Loups de US Entraigues XIII leading 2-0. It will presumably return when the ban on amateur sport is lifted in France.
  • The success of last season’s President’s Cup sees the NSWRL trying something similar again in 2021. It appears that some mix of Sydney Shield and Ron Massey will form a central conference, with the Newcastle RL to the north in another conference and Illawarra RL in the south. This surprisingly innovative format from the hidebound Blues has some potential and will be worth keeping an eye on, especially with the participation of the Kaiviti Silktails, who are basing themselves in New South Wales for this season. After it becomes clear no one has any meaningful interest in NSW Cup/NRL reserve grade, it’s possible this becomes NSW’s answer to the Queensland Cup, which would be a good thing.
  • BRL A-grade was the second tier of Queensland football below the NRL, after the QCup was cancelled for 2020. It was the first season under the “new” system of having affiliations with the Brisbane-based QCup clubs. Eight teams completed the season (down from the mooted nine after Beenleigh dropped out and the originally planned for ten). Wynnum Manly ran out premiers again, defeating Wests in the final after minor premiers Valleys stumbled earlier in the finals. I assume we’re running out this way again with Pine Rivers and Brighton (Dolphins), Carina and Bulimba (Tigers), Normanby (Magpies), Wests and Valleys (Devils) and Wynnum Juniors or maybe Beenleigh (Seagulls). Marmin Barba has nominally retired from Cup and has been spotted at Wests. Hopefully Scott Prince can suit up for Valleys again.
  • The USARL looks primed to kick off in May with twelve clubs, the most since 2017 (and slightly down on the 14 that participated in 2015-16). This is good news considering I wasn’t sure it’d be back at all.

Hopefully, we will be able to complete a GRLFC ranking with a women’s equivalent for 2021.

The Warrior Dolphins

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Just before kick-off of the Bulldogs-Dragons spoon bowl on Monday, the Warriors dropped a big press release. Contained within is an important story with a lot of implications for rugby league, so let’s go through them.

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For the Broncos

It wasn’t that long ago that the Broncos had six feeder clubs in the Queensland Cup. It was probably too many, even if we ignore the fact that the Capras’ remoteness makes them relatively useless. I guess Brisbane felt a responsibility to give all of the clubs something, even if it wasn’t necessarily in the optimal interest of everyone.

Over the first off-season, the Jets aligned themselves with the Newcastle Knights. Seemingly this is because the Broncos and Jets organisations had differing philosophies and the new partnership makes “very good sense as Newcastle is really Ipswich by the sea”.

Even though NRL-contracted Knights players will still drop down into the Knights’ Canterbury Cup squad rather than the Jets’ Intrust Super Cup team, Ipswich now forms part of the Newcastle pathway. Presumably this means the Knights will get some sort of droit du seigneur on Ipswich kids, provided that they aren’t snapped up by other clubs beforehand (if you think geographical boundaries mean anything, you can go count the talented alumni of Gold Coast high schools at the Brisbane Broncos).

Then, not long after the conclusion of the second off-season, the Dolphins suddenly announced that they too were leaving the stable. They first joined in 2006, leaving the Roosters to fend for themselves. The Toowoomba Clydesdales, the Broncos’ other feeder at the time, folded not long after, were replaced by Aspley for one season in the Queensland Cup and then the focus shifted to the Dolphins form 2008 onwards.

The Dolphins had been given imperial preference by the Broncos. The best of the rest played at Redcliffe and the club formed something of a finishing school for future Broncos. The Dolphins played Matt Lodge for a season in 2018 as the Broncos waited out the PR penalty for that signing and got Lodge back into shape. In short, the clubs were tight and now they are not.

In the space of six months, Brisbane has gone from six to four feeders. It’s something of a high performance sporting break-up. No one knows (yet, exactly) why. Given the current state of the team’s first grade side and both front and back offices, eyebrows are necessarily raised.

For the Warriors

A New Zealand Warriors-branded team replaced the Auckland Vulcans in the New South Wales state cup in 2014. Since then, the reserve Warriors have bobbed around average but hardly blown the doors off the competition. Their best season was 2017, finishing in second place with a 13-5-4 record, before exiting in the prelims.

The re-purchase of the Warriors by a combination of the Auckland Rugby League via the Carlaw Heritage Trust and Autex Industries, a long time supporter of New Zealand rugby league, in April 2018 led to a hint that the Warriors reserves would run through the Auckland rugby league premiership, with the aim of raising that competition’s standard. That never happened and Autex ended up buying out the rest of the Warriors after a break down of “over a difference in philosophies and personality clashes”.

So it seems that the idea is on the backburner and the Warriors have seized a great opportunity. 

The main benefit will be leveraging the Dolphins’ extensive experience in developing players. This doesn’t seem to have been to be the Warriors’ major issue. Having access to the best talent that New Zealand rugby union overlooked or discarded means having access to so many kids with potential that it’s hard to fail to develop at least a few stars. Nonetheless, the finishing school might be the one or two percent polish on development players that’s separating the Warriors from that elusive premiership.

Shuttling reserve grade players from Auckland to Brisbane is probably no more difficult than shuttling them between Auckland and Sydney. The state cup travel load in Queensland is greater than in New South Wales but it won’t be anything that Redcliffe, or the Warriors for that matter, won’t already be used to. It might be worth it if the deal comes with some Knights-style droit du seigneur on unscouted talent in the Moreton Bay region.

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For the Dolphins

With the Dolphins bidding to become the NRL’s second Brisbane franchise and if they are successful, the relationship with the Broncos would inevitably have to be severed. This might be the first, albeit somewhat premature, step.

The basic math is that if NRL squads have thirty signatories and only seventeen can play on game day and minus a few injuries, there’s roughly six to ten pros who need something to do each weekend. Typically, they play in reserve grade competitions, as accommodated by the NRL’s farm teams. In New South Wales, those surplus to first grade’s requirements are sent to play at one club but in Queensland, players are assigned to a varying number of clubs. The fringe first graders are generally better quality than the other state cup-level footballers, so getting as many into your lineup is critical to success in the second tier. 

When the Broncos’ cup ran over, the Dolphins were the primary beneficiary. The benefit for Redcliffe now is that instead of sharing nine or ten fringe first graders with Souths Logan, Norths and Wynnum-Manly, they can get a NRL club’s set of players to themselves. In terms of the 2019 Warriors, think Chanel Harris-Tavita, Tom Ale and a handful of forwards that have played at NRL level, like Bunty Afoa, Ligi Sao and Sam Lisone, and instead of getting two or three of them, the Dolphins will now have all five.

For the Queensland Cup

In the most recent editions of the Queensland Cup, there’s generally been four clubs in the mix: Redcliffe (Broncos), Burleigh (Titans), Townsville (Cowboys) and whichever of Easts and Sunshine Coast the Storm happen to favour that season. There’s the occasional incursion from your Hunters and Seagulls types but generally that’s been four of the top six.

Introducing a fifth NRL club will presumably add a fifth power. Considering Redcliffe is already one of those powers, it will be from the Broncos reassigning their talent elsewhere. They have only three metro clubs to choose from: Wynnum-Manly, Souths Logan and Norths. We could baselessly speculate that the Magpies, already home to Cory Paix, Tom Dearden and Tesi Niu in 2020, will become New Redcliffe but perhaps the Broncos would prefer to build on the stronger base at Kougari, as Wynnum-Manly finished runners-up in three grades in 2019.

Even if the Broncos split the difference, one of the clubs will likely luck out and rise up, so the establishment of a new feeder relationship resets the balance in a way not seen since NSWRL clubs were allowed to feed into the competition.

Still unknown is the fate of the under 20s and under 18s Warriors’ and Dolphins’ sides. The Warriors did not participate in Jersey Flegg in 2020 as is, after going 9-9-2 in 2019, but the SG Ball side sat in third when the competition was suspended. While the Storm uses Queensland feeders, their junior sides play in the NSW competitions as of last year. Perhaps we will see junior Dolphins continue in the Queensland competitions and junior Warriors playing in Auckland. Further unknown is if Redcliffe get the nod to go up to the NRL, whether the Warriors will return to NSW or partner with a different Queensland club.

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For the NSW Cup

Now we ask ourselves, what actually is the point of the New South Wales Cup?

The Canterbury Cup is stuck between two ideas: that the second tier competition should be a reserve grade for the Sydney NRL clubs and that there should be a high level competition across the state of New South Wales. The recent merger of the Country Rugby League into the NSWRL makes the question more pertinent.

Where is the representation of regional NSW in the state competition? Other than Newcastle, the cup is limited to a triangle between Woollongong, Penrith and Gosford. Roughly three million people, enough to be the fourth largest state in the country in its own right, live in the ACT and New South Wales outside of Sydney.

With the Canterbury Cup now down to eleven contestants, it’s time for the NSWRL to consider what its purpose is. Dare I suggest expansion to engage a wider base? There are six regions in the CRL that could provide the basis of new teams. Combine that with the Sydney has-beens (North Sydney, Newtown, Western Suburbs) and the never-weres (Mounties, Wenty, Blacktown) and a few outside teams, like the Kaiviti Silktails or new teams established in the southern states, and you’d have yourself a pretty decent league with a totally different flavour to the NRL.

We could also dispense with the idea that taking Sydney club games to regional areas is good because they would have teams to call their own, forcing the Sydney clubs to pull their fingers out and find some fans.

Of course such an approach would undermine the direct influence that the Sydney NRL clubs have, so it will never fly. They may point to earlier, half-hearted efforts made in areas outside of Sydney and their presumed failure as a reason to consolidate the competition into a vanilla reserve grade offering. “We tried that, it didn’t work.”

Insofar as there’s any measure of the respective popularity of the second tier comps, the Queensland grand final seems to attract greater attendances than its New South Wales counterpart. My theory is that while the quality is generally stronger in New South Wales (fewer clubs with more fringe first graders) it has less appeal because its main selling point is to have the same clubs as the NRL but with worse rosters. Its difficult to see such a competition achieving any degree of popularity, outside of the anoraks who have read this far and people watching the lead-in to the Sunday arvo game.

The thing about different clubs is that they represent different areas, have different colours and different histories. These clubs have different meanings and that’s what gets people to care. Fans having multiple clubs to support across different competitions would be a net benefit for rugby league, keeping people more engaged and for longer.

Maybe think about it, New South Wales.

Primer – TPR

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For the third season in a row, I’m changing the player rating system. We mourn the passing of Statscore (not really) and PPG (again, not really) as we slowly converge on to a system that I can take for granted and don’t have to refine any further.

The core of the system hasn’t changed. The proposition is that there are important and unimportant statistics and that counting the important ones provides information about players and teams and can be predictive.

PPG was useful, and development and application through 2019 demonstrated that:

The last one should be taught in universities as a perfect example of ringing the bell at the top. Sheer narrative power subsequently forced Pearce back to mean and Brown onto the compost heap.

The mechanics of PPG have been preserved through TPR. My biggest issue is that when I wrote about production (that is, the accumulation of useful statistics), I didn’t have any units to work with. I originally didn’t think this would be a problem but it would make some things clearer if I did have units. So I took a leaf from the sciences and landed on naming it after the man that could do it all, David “Coal Train” Taylor.

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“PPG”, which was Production – and not Points – Per Game, doesn’t make much sense now, so that’s been punted and replaced with TPR, or Taylor Player Rating. There has been a substantial change in the way I’d calculated WARG in the primer at the start of 2019 and the way I calculated it in Rugby league’s replacement player at the end. The latter method is now canonical but the name is going to stick.

In brief, TPR and WARG are derived through the following six steps:

  1. Run linear regressions to confirm which statistics correlate with winning percentage. The stats get distributed in to buckets and we review the success of teams achieving those statistics. One crucial change was to exclude any buckets from the regression with fewer than ten games in it. We end up with tries, running metres, kick return metres, post-contact metres, line breaks, line break assists, try assists, tackle busts, hit ups, dummy half run metres, missed tackles (negative), kick metres, forced drop outs, errors (negative) and, in Queensland only, penalties (negative) as having significant correlations out of the data provided by the NRL.
  2. Take the slope of the trendline calculated in the regression and weight it by its correlation (higher the correlation, the higher the weighting). Through this weighting, we develop a series of equivalences between stats. The below is shows the quantities required of each stat to be equivalent to one try in 2020:
    equivalences
  3. Players who accumulate these statistics are said to be generating production, which is now measured in Taylors, and is the product of the weighting/slope multiplied by the quantity of stats accumulated multiplied by 1000. However, due to the limitations of the statistics, some positions on the field generate significantly more Taylors than others.
    Average Taylors per game by position (1)
  4. To combat this, the production generated each game is then compared to the average production generated at that position (averaging previous 5 seasons of data in NRL, 3 seasons for State Cup). We make the same adjustments for time on field as in PPG and then divide by 10 for aesthetic purposes. The resulting number is the Taylor Player Rating, or TPR.
  5. We derive a formula for estimating win probability based on production for each competition and then substitute in a winning percentage of .083 (or two wins in twenty-four games, per the previous definition of a replacement-level team) and estimate the amount of production created by a team of fringe players against the competition average. This gives us a TPR that we can set replacement level at. The Taylors created over and above replacement level is added to the notional replacement level team’s production and the increase in winning probability is attributed to that player as a Win Above Reserve Grade, or WARG. Replacement level in TPR for the NRL is .057, Queensland is .072 and NSW is .070. The career WARG leaders are currently:
    career warg
  6. Finally, we go back and check that it all makes sense by confirming that TPR has some predictive power (~61% successful tipping rate, head-to-head) and there’s a correlation with team performance (~0.60 r-squared for team season production against team winning percentage).

For a more in-depth explanation, you can refer back to the original PPG primer. The differences between last year’s system and this year’s are slight and, for most intents and purposes, PPG and TPR are equivalent. Some of the changes are small in impact but important.

The most obvious change is the addition of NSW Cup data to the Queensland Cup and NRL datasets. This was driven by my interest in assessing the farm systems of each NRL club and you can’t make a decent fist of that if you’re missing twelve feeder clubs from the picture. It will also allow me to better test talent identification in the lower levels if I have more talents to identify and to better set expectations of players as they move between competitions.

For the most recent seasons, TPR only uses past data to calculate its variables, whereas PPG used all of the data available and created a false sense of success. A system that uses 2018 data to create after-the-fact predictions for the 2018 season isn’t going to give you an accurate view of how it will perform in 2019.

Finally, projecting player performance into the future is a pretty powerful concept, even if the tools for doing so are limited. I went back and re-derived all of the reversion-to-mean formulas used in The Art of Projection. It turns out that the constants for the projection formula don’t change much between seasons, so this is fixed across the datasets for now. It also turns out adjustments for age and experience are different and largely useless under the TPR system, such is the ephemera of statistical analysis.

One application for projections is that I’ll be able to run season simulations using the winning probability formula and team production that will be able to measure the impact of including or excluding a player on the outcome of a team’s season. It may not be super-accurate (the projections have large average errors) but it will be interesting. I also like the idea that out- or under-performance of projections as an assessment of coaching.

Finally, to reiterate things that I think are important caveats: TPR is a value-over-average rate statistic, while WARG is a volume statistic. No, statistics don’t tell the whole story and even these ones don’t measure effectiveness. Yes, any player rating system is going to have a certain level of arbitrariness to it because the system designer has to make decisions about what they consider important and unimportant. I’m fully aware of these things and wrote 1500 words accordingly at the end of the PPG primer.

A thing I’m trying to do this season is publish all of my rating systems on Google Sheets so anyone can have a look. You can see match-by-match ratings for NRL and the two State Cups if that’s your jam.