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How hard is your team’s draw in 2013?
The 2013 National Rugby League draw is an under-analysed aspect of our game. Released in November 2012 to little fanfare, the 2013 NRL Draw is unique in that for the first time in a while the fans know the schedule for the first 20 rounds of the season.
This will help people plan trips to go and see their team interstate. I know my mates have already identified some road trips for the boys in 2013.
But because each team doesn’t play each other twice, the draw is likely to be harder for some teams depending on how the draw has been constructed.
For some unknown reason, the experts don’t look at the difficulty of each team’s draw until we are in the final 6 games of the regular season (‘the run home’). They seem to just assume that the NRL is doing things in an even-handed way.
I am a little less trusting of authority and I know the NRL is more concerned with TV scheduling than preserving the integrity and evenness of the NRL competition.
So…which teams are playing the better teams twice? Which teams have an easy start to the season? To answer these questions I think there is a need for a basic system to accurately and objectively analyse exactly how difficult each team’s draw looks to be.
Below I have given each a team a score reflecting how hard they are as an opponent, using last year’s ladder as the determining factor. With 16 teams in the NRL I have used a simple ranking from 1 to 16 (with the higher number reflecting the difficulty of the opponent).
So the 2012 Premiers the Storm are 16, the runners up the Bulldogs are 15, third place Souths are 14…etc. This approach is followed all the way down to the team that got the Wooden Spoon (the Eels) with a score of 1. For those of you that have forgotten exactly how 2012 panned out, the score for each team have been provided:
** Note: Where two teams were knocked out the same week of the finals (e.g. Sharks and Broncos), I have ranked them based on their position on the ladder after the conclusion of the regular season (i.e. after round 26).
I then used a spreadsheet to simply plug in these scores for the draw of each team in 2013. Using this approach, the higher the total score a team has after 26 rounds = the harder their draw is in 2013 (and vice versa).
Before discussing the results, I concede this approach isn’t perfect and the main drawbacks are:
• The 2012 results may not be as relevant in 2013 if the form of each team differs greatly from last year.
• I have not looked at the State of Origin schedule and the effect this would have. I have done this because I cannot accurately predict the likely Origin teams this far out.
The Findings: 2013 Draw Revealed
The Knights have unluckily been dealt the hardest draw in 2013, recording a score of 220. In contrast, the Panthers have been given the easiest ride in 2013 with a score of 186.
But it is more interesting to break down the data and look at the opening 12 rounds of the 2013 season draw. A team may have a very easy start to the season, but then their draw gets harder as the season goes on (or vice versa). This is very helpful in avoiding the common mistake of reading too much into the opening few months of footy.
The Titans and Eels for example, who both have relatively difficult draws in 2013, have been given the easiest start to the season.
Over the first 12 games of the 2013 seasons, the Eels and Titans have recorded a score of only 84 and 85 respectively. So if the Titans or Eels start the 2013 season on fire, I would be a little cautious getting too carried away with their results, as we now know both teams have a lot of tough games in the latter half of the season.
The Sharks on the other hand, who have the third easiest draw for the entire season, have been given a difficult start to the season with a score of 110. So if the Sharks struggle early in the year, I won’t be writing them off as they can come home with a wet sail.
Is this analysis actually useful?
Before publishing this article, I decided that in order to see whether I was onto something here, it would be worth doing the exact same analysis for the 2012 season that we just witnessed. If I was indeed onto something, then perhaps calculating how difficult each team’s draw was in 2012 would be revealing.
So using the exact same method discussed above (i.e. Using the 2011 ladder for the rankings table), I went through and calculated the difficulty of each team’s draw in 2012.
Here are the results from 2012 (remembering, the higher the score = the harder the draw):
So as you can see, the results really are interesting! The range of scores is very even, with the exception of the highest score (Titans) and lowest score (Storm).
This means that according to my draw difficulty rating system, the Storm were given a significantly easier run than any other team in 2012.
This is not to take away from the Storm in anyway, as they were one of the most deserved Premiers we have had in years. They solidly defeated all-comers in the finals and did so with key players carrying niggling injuries.
But it is worth noting that in 2012, the Storm played the 3 other top four teams from 2011 only once each (they were of course a top four team too).
Compare this to the Titans, which had to play all of the top 4 teams from 2011 twice each.
Now just because the Storm were 2012 Premiers and the Titans came very close to getting the wooden spoon, this doesn’t mean I think I have uncovered some miracle predictor.
But I think the above results do suggest that analysing the difficulty of each team’s draw is something worth doing….and then re-doing as the season progresses.
So I will use this same method to look at how difficult the draw is for each team at the halfway mark of the 2013 season (but obviously I will use the 2013 ladder as it stands at that point in time for scoring purposes).
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