The NRL’s 2024 season launch in Las Vegas was incredibly successful, exceeding most expectations with two excellent games held before a crowd of over 40,000. I’ve been critical of the games current administration for several reasons, but credit where credit is due, and this event was a huge achievement. Both games were high quality and entertaining, something that always isn’t the case with Round 1 matches. It’s even more impressive given the lack of trial minutes played by the participants, although this did become evident late in the first game when fatigue appeared to set in. I don’t usually break...
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Another attempt at projecting NRL player value for 2024
Last season on the Eye Test I had a crack at projecting player value for the 2023 season, estimating player salaries based on prior statistical production as well as other factors like player age progression. It wasn’t a failure, but there were clearly areas for improvement. I looked back at the projections in September and noted there were a lot of players I was very close with, like Cameron Munster (0.8% difference), Junior Paulo (0.3%) and Dylan Edwards (0.2%). But there also some that I had missed by a wide mark, like Reece Walsh and Shaun Johnson. In the end...
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Explainer: Expected Run Metres for the NRL
2024 marks the fifth season of the Eye Test covering the NRL with this site’s advanced statistics. I have no idea how I made it to five seasons, especially after whatever 2021 was. But somehow I’ve made it through to the other side and I’m happy with how the advanced statistics have been working. Mostly. There’s one comment I regularly get about the Eye Test’s Run % metric that always sticks in my head. Which is that it doesn’t judge the quality of that run, just the quantity. The metric just shows (as a percentage) an estimate of how often...
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Explainer: NRL general play kick spray charts
One of the many things I’ve been working on during the off season is kicking spray charts for the NRL and rugby league in general. I’d been wondering if different players had different kicking profiles and if there was a way to visualise this. I got the idea from seeing some MLB spray charts on social media. The idea behind this chart is that it visualises where a player is hitting the ball overall, and allows you to filter down on different variables such as how they fare against certain pitch types. It makes it quite clear what the path...
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How did the Eye Test do at projecting NRL player salaries for 2023?
Before the start of the 2023 NRL season I tried a thought experiment where I used this site’s player attribution metric (ETPCR) and tried to project player salaries for the upcoming season. I wanted to see if I could use this metric to predict performance for players this season and judge how well it worked. You can go back and read the post now, but the methodology hasn’t changed. Here’s the quick version as a refresher but I’d highly recommend reading the original for my thoughts on the process before moving on. Using the data I have going back to...
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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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