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.
Last week, we took a look at estimating the number of premierships we expected NRL teams to have won versus the number of premierships they actually won. This was spurred by a Twitter query from AFL fan, Bill (whose name I don’t remember and won’t be searching for), who asked the same question of someone else but about AFL.
Well Bill, this week, I did it for you.
If you’re the Eels, probably a lot more than zero. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Around the start of the finals last year, The Arc posted the probabilities of each finalist winning the AFL grand final. Some guy on Twitter (let’s call him Bill because I don’t remember who it was and I’m not digging out a throwaway tweet from six months ago) asked if the probabilities had been calculated for all finals series throughout history so we could see how many teams were expected to win against reality. They hadn’t but more on that next week.
I thought, in the true embodiment of the philosophy of this site, “That’s a great idea. I’m gonna do that but for NRL.”
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.
