It’s recap time as we look at the action from Round 18 and head off on tangents on fast players, meme clubs and more.
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The rules and “stats”
Before I start, great show boys. The shows are definitely a highlight of the week.
You and all your contributors do a great job of making things informative and amusing.
A couple of weeks ago you were asking if differentials increase towards the end of a season.
Traditionally, a greater percentage of “blow outs” occur after round 16.
There are multiple factors for this. Fatigue, injuries, teams out of contention / have given up vs teams with finals hope. We can expect in the run in to the Finals that margins will increase if History is any judge.
At Round 16 the Melbourne Storm team had a points differential plus 390. This is the equal best of all time at this stage of the season.
The Storm have scored 484 points by round 16. This is as many points as the salary cap breaching Storm side scored in 26 rounds.
Compare those two sides. Can you honestly say this current Storm team’s attack is far superior to one that contained Smith, Cronk, Slater, Inglis, Chamers and Folau?
The 2001 Eels took took until round 19 to score 484 points. The Eels 839 points = 32.3 points per game. The Storm are currently at 36.5 per game.
The Storm can get to 923 at the rate they’ve been scoring over the 5 rounds prior to Round 16.
2021 has seen the equal most teams of all time held to nil after 16 rounds. 11 in all. In a sport where the ball has to be handed over to the opposition, how do we get so many teams scoring nil?
This season has seen the most ever games with a 24 point margin over 16 rounds.
The lowest percentage of games with a 0 to 6 points difference since 1954. The second lowest of all time.
The Panthers have the 4th best for against of all time.
The Eels have the 34th best for and against of all time.
Hand on heart, do you think this current Eels side is one of the top 40 best sides of all time?
Someone actually pointed out, statistically speaking, AFL games have closer margins than NRL games at the moment.
The current rule set may not be wholly responsible for these scorelines but they are a huge contributor.
I’m not one for knee jerk reactions and a “wait and see” policy is one I usually advocate for.
We have played more than 110 games in 2021. We can compare these 110 games to the more than 2,000 games played in the past 20 years and the sample size is sufficient to understand the rules as they stand at the moment should not be the rules beyond 2021.
Cheers and keep up the quite frankly amazing work you’ve been doing.
Lambretta
PS. None of that work above was ny own.
100% stolen as you’d expect from a lazy degenerate twat like me.