Tag Archives: premiership

Who will win the 2019 NRL Premiership?

Posted on by

At this time of year, is there anything else you want to know more than the answer to this question?

For our crystal ball, we turn to Monte Carlo simulations. These simulations work on the principle that if we know the inputs to a complex system and how they relate to each other, then we can test the outcomes of that system using random numbers to simulate different situations.

At its most basic, just imagine if you simulated the outcome of football matches by rolling dice. Numbers one and two might represent a win for the Gold Coast and numbers three through six might be a win for Wests. If you repeat that a couple of thousand times, not only will you be extremely bored but the Gold Coast will “win” about 33% of the time and Wests 66%.

Now take the same approach for the nine finals games, with the winner advancing per the NRL’s system, but instead of using dice, you generate a random number between zero and one and calculate the win probability using Archimedes (form) Elo ratings. Then repeat it 5,000 times over. The number of times that the Storm or Roosters or Broncos or Eels “win” the premiership across your simulations should give you some insight into the probability of that happening in real life. I call this the Finals Stocky and I present its findings.

Embed from Getty Images

Read more

Stats of Six – Rep/Origin Weekend, 2018

Posted on by

Not being a typical NRL round weekend, I find myself at a loss for a Thursday post so I thought I’d toss a bunch of little things out there – six, to be specific – and see what sticks. I don’t expect this to be a regular format but it might come in handy to get smaller ideas out there, especially seeing as all anyone is reading these days seems to be long form works of analysis and history.

Embed from Getty Images

Read more

A Complete History of the NRL

Posted on by

Two weeks ago, you may have (but almost certainly did not) read my Complete History of the NRL: Nerd Edition.

Actually, there wasn’t much to read in the way of words and for those who aren’t so inclined to dealing with Elo ratings, Pythagorean expectation and counting premierships, possibly because you’re an Eels fan and don’t remember what victory feels like, I’ve prepared a simpler edition of the Complete History of the NRL.

The history is presented in a series of colourful graphs. The graphs track each team’s win per season and are helpfully annotated to remind you of great moments in NRL history.

And if you’re familiar with the work of Jon Bois, you’ll recognise this as eerily similar to his History of Every NFL Team video, which I have shamelessly ripped off for content.

Read more

Predicting this year’s NRL premiership winner with class

Posted on by

Can we predict a premiership winner from their Elo ratings?

Embed from Getty Images

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:

Read more