Analysis

The Eye Test’s NRLW advanced statistic leaders for season 2023

Club football is done for the year, and just as we did for the NRLM we’re going to look at the NRLW advanced statistic leaders for 2023.  Unlike the NRLM version, I will be including the three finals games in these advanced statistics. The first reason is that nine games isn’t really a sufficient sample size to work with so extending that out where possible could be useful, although it won’t change anything for the bottom six teams. For NRLM, there’s no reason to include finals games as we already have a sample size of 24 games, and I don’t...

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An end of season update to the Eye Test’s simulated Dally M voting system

Just over a month ago I posted a thought experiment around using statistics, and most notably this site’s player attribution metric, to simulate a Dally M voting system and see who would come out on top as player of the year. I tried a few methods, but most of them came out with similar results on top, and other than the distribution of forwards there weren’t any real glaring issues. You can catch up on it here, but I’m going to use one method from that post to check out the player and team of the year. With the NRL’s...

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Final NRLW efficiency update – the inevitability of a Roosters/Knights grand final

The NRLW regular season has wrapped up and with finals starting this weekend we can look back at the season as a whole and see if there’s any takeaways from the Eye Test’s efficiency analysis for the whole 2023 season. If you’re new to the site, to examine team efficiency in attack and defense we look at how each club has performed under the site’s expected point model (ETxP), and compare those expected outcomes to their actual on field performances. Teams that score more points than their field position would typically yield are deemed more efficient, and those that give...

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NRLW 2023 Bootwatch – I hope you like Asics  

As I noted after NRLW Round 1 I’ve been planning to introduce as much parity as possible between my NRLM and NRLW content this season. Sadly real life got in the way last week and I had to skip a week of NRLW content, and I’d like to apologise for that. But I’m back this week with one of the most requested NRLW analysis yet to appear on the site. That’s right, the immensely important and popular Bootwatch is now looking at the women’s game. For some reason Sockwatch was more requested but I don’t have as much of an...

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The Eye Test’s advanced statistic leaders for NRL season 2023

The long 27 round slog that was the NRL 2023 season has finally concluded, which means we can take a look at which players topped the charts for the Eye Test’s suite of advanced statistics.  If you’re a recent visitor to the Eye Test, I would recommend checking out the explainers on of them to get an idea of what type of player behaviour I’m trying to measure with these metrics. These aren’t your typical counting statistics where everyone is trying to fill up a bucket and the more things you put in your bucket the better. For these statistics...

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Can anyone keep up with the Roosters and Knights? NRLW August efficiency update

This week’s NRLW post will be an efficiency update, similar to the monthly posts I’ve been marking for NRLM. For those new to the site or only following the NRLW content, we look at actual scoring compared with each teams expected points to gauge how effectively they’re using possession, and how capably they are defending against good field position. If you want an explainer on the site’s expected points model, a lengthy one is available here. Quickly, the short version is that every start of possession is worth a certain number of points based on the probability of scoring from...

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