Rugby League

Another month, another chance to update on how efficient each NRL team has been in attack and defense for the 2023 season. Previously I had been framing how teams perform compared to their expected points as over or performing, but I’ve had a thought based on some feedback from the April update and it’s better explained as an attacking and defensive efficiency metric than on overall performance alone. In a way I had been doing that by comparing teams expected points with actual scoring and putting teams into inefficient and efficient buckets, but this would just be extending it further....

Origin fever is hitting peak levels this week (although apparently not in Adelaide). Which means it’s the midpoint of the 2023 NRL season and as we did last year and the year before , is time for the regular roundup of the Eye Test’s advanced statistical leaders over the first half of the competition. For new readers to the site, in this post we’ll take each of the advanced metrics for rugby league that I’ve created and adjusted over the past few seasons and see which players are performing well, and for some of them, not so well. The challenge...

Another NRL round has concluded, and yet again the Gold Coast Titans have surrendered a lead that they should have held on to. After leading 14-0 at the major break, they capitulated and threw away a lead that was defend-able, succumbing to Canterbury 20-18. The last 12 minutes of this game were particularly diabolical for them, with the following string of penalties occurring whilst holding on to an 18-14 lead (that they would eventually surrender): 76th minute – dangerous tackle (Aaron Schoupp) 73rd minute – ball strip (David Fifita) 69th minute – dangerous tackle (Tino Fa’asuamaleaui) 68th minute – dangerous...

Since I couldn’t be joining the swathes of NRL fans on Caxton street this season, I decided to spend my valuable weekend time cataloguing which colour and brand of boots every NRL player wore at Magic Round. If there’s useless information I can track and create content out of, you can bet I’m going to do so. Whilst that sounds like a significant time investment, it’s not the first time I’ve done it so I’ve managed to build some economies of scale into the process. After a while you start to recognise the design language each brand uses, as well...

The month of April has closed and after nine rounds of the 2023 NRL season every team is at least one third of the way through their campaign. That makes it a good time to update every team’s progress by expected points to see which of them are over or under performing. We did this a month ago, but with only 4-5 games played the sample size was small enough that a lucky win or loss had too much influence. As we did last time, we’re going to compare each team’s on field performance with what they would have been...

Friday night’s game against Brisbane was always going to be a test for the Parramatta Eels. Facing the competition leaders in Darwin on a short turnaround was always going to be tough, but the Eels made it tougher on themselves with simple errors and were obviously exhausted early. If you want to read a full recap of the game, friend of the site Liam of The Maroon Observer has a tremendous write up that I’d suggest reading. I’d also highly suggest subscribing to his substack as he’s putting out at least 4 pieces of content per week, and if you...