Another NRC season has been run and won, and with it the Brisbane City juggernaut rolls on.

Their 21-10 defeat of the University of Canberra Vikings extended their unbeaten run of matches out to 14, and going back to Round 8 last season. Clearly, City have got things worked out.

But what of the rest of the competition, and indeed, the competition itself?

To close the book on rugby for 2015, I’ve gone back to June and that chat I had with ARU General Manager, Pathways and Performance, Ben Whitaker, as well as adding a few observations of my own.

In 2015 I was lucky enough to see eight NRC games in person, including the final, and watched all but a few of all other games on the Fox Sports live streams or broadcasts, as well as the weekly coverage for The Roar and directly for www.BuildcorpNRC.com.au.

The good
Having watched as many games as I did this year, I certainly have to say that for the most part, the rugby was really enjoyable. Back in June, Whitaker told me that he hoped we would “see teams further embrace the style of game that you saw in 2014,” and this was definitely the case.

Speaking of the expectation that teams would this season have a much better handle on the Law Variations, Whitaker said that he expected defences to be much better organised.

“Hopefully that creates a better contest, and it also means that attack will have to evolve as well. I think one year on, we’ll learn how to play to the Laws [the variations applied to the NRC],” Whitaker said.

The general consensus in 2015 was that defences certainly were better. Teams put a very clear focus on defence in their build-up to the season, and attacking plans certainly had to adapt to find ways through. And they did obviously find their way through, because as I mentioned several times during the year, there were more tries scored in 2015 despite the improved defences. An increased ball-in-play time was seen as the major explanation for this phenomenon.

Certainly, the live streaming platform through the Fox Sports website, and produced on the ground by Bar TV Sports was a massive plus for the NRC this year. Knowing whether you’d be able to watch any particular game in any particular round was no longer guesswork, and the quality of the feeds were very good.

As a disclaimer, I’ll mention my involvement in commentary for a number of games this year, and it’s fair to say it took the first few rounds to iron out a few kinks. But once sorted, everything worked well; the consistency of production in terms of look and feel and sound was very good, and you could see in the Monday night highlights show that the streamed games came up just as well as the Thursday night TV broadcast.

The clubs once again were very generous with the availability of players and coaches both pre- and post-match, which was great, as they want the competition and the product to succeed as much as anyone. I’ll extend that out to access during the week for feature interviews and preview chats, too, with all clubs again keen to have their stories told.

Marketing overall, was also greatly improved in 2015. The vast majority of clubs were quite proactive in trying to spread the word in their local media, and the competition marketing at the ARU level was also significantly better. Social media remains the key driver with its low costs, but the clubs and the competition also now have a much better handle on how to consistently drive content through their respective websites.

Obviously, sites like The Roar, Green and Gold Rugby, and Rugby News remain front and centre in terms of competition coverage, and with the Rugby World Cup getting almost all the mainstream media resources and coverage, the NRC does still feel somewhat tucked away. Fox Sports also upped their coverage in 2015, supplementing the Thursday night broadcast with NRC Extra Time on Monday nights, as well as a much improved online offering in conjunction with the match streams.

All nine clubs started the season with major sponsors, too, which is obviously great news. Some clubs fared better than others in terms of corporate support – North Harbour and NSW Country have close to a full complement of sponsors locked in for the next few seasons now – but the fact that no team started the season with a clean strip is recognition that companies do see a value in the NRC.

On that front too, if you wanted to show your support for your NRC team in 2015, you could. Merchandise was a lot more prevalent this season, with most of not all clubs doing something.

And maybe the best thing about the NRC this year is that the critics seemed to drop away. There were a few at the start of the season, but most arguments remaining now are cosmetic or superficial. Certainly, my challenging of critics to outline exactly how the rugby played in the NRC was different, or what Laws were being ignored shut a few people up at the start of the season.

The not so good
Crowds are the obvious starting point, with roughly a quarter of the crowd dropping off from the 2014 average, by my own records based on official and club estimated numbers.

The Sydney Stars and the Greater Sydney Rams remain the biggest concern in terms of attracting a crowd, with match attendances estimated only in the hundreds for their home games. Not even playing some decent rugby at times helped the Stars pull a crowd at Leichhardt Oval in 2015, while the Rams suffered the same problems as last year despite taking three of their four home games out to member clubs.

Ben Whitaker believed – or hoped, perhaps – that 2015 would see a more committed involvement from NSW Rugby and the Waratahs in terms of competition of both the competition and the four clubs: the Stars, Rams, Rays, and Eagles.

Whitaker said back in June that the ARU were also tipping in to aid promotion around Sydney, and while I certainly saw some evidence of that, I sadly can’t say the same of the Waratahs. Short of a few retweets here and there, it’s difficult to find many original NRC-related tweets out of @NSWWaratahs. They managed to argue with the Brumbies over Twitter for a week about a trial match next year in Wagga Wagga, yet sent just two original tweets to support the Stars before their semi-final.

The number of Super Rugby-contracted players allowed in any one squad remains an ongoing concern, and it was certainly clear that the teams with little representation from the higher level struggled in general. The Stars making the semi-finals would seem to contradict that statement, but being beaten by 60 by both the very strong Canberra and Brisbane City sides only underlines the issue.

The general rule was that club players could run with the Super Rugby player-laden sides for about 50-60 minutes before fitness and superior skillsets blew the scores out. And that doesn’t help the constant talk that one of the Sydney sides should be chopped, either.

Goal-kicking across the competition had an appearance of improvement in 2015, but it’s a bit more confusing than that. The season average of 70 per cent is slightly down on the 71 per cent achieved last year, which is still not brilliant.

The improvement came with the frontline guys, with four of the top five regular kickers kicking at better than 80 per cent, compared to just one last year. Where it fell away though was with the second stringers. In 2014 all but a few kicked in the 50-65 per cent range, whereas in 2015, there were eleven kickers under 58 per cent and nine of them no better than 50 per cent. And a couple of them actually started the season as first choice kickers, too.

I’ve not seen any TV ratings from Fox Sports again this year and so can’t really comment on whether they were better or worse than 2014. I do know that no NRC broadcast cracked the Top 20 Subscription TV programs on that day this season, meaning that as was the case in 2014, no game rated more than 40-45,000 viewers.

I similarly don’t have any numbers around haw many people watched the live streams, though anecdotally, I know the Bar TV guys were happy with the numbers they had seen.

What needs work
No question, ‘marketing’ will remain at the top of the list for the 2016 season, and like all fledging competitions, this is going to be an ongoing concern for the next few years probably. I would say that general awareness of the NRC was better in 2015, yet that hasn’t equated to better crowds and the competition still lacks that crucial ‘cut-through’ into the mainstream media.

It’s going to take a lot of work in future seasons for everyone involved: the ARU, the nine NRC clubs, Fox Sports, the venues, and in the Sydney market particularly, the Waratahs and the member clubs.

Let me say this. Even just a simple division of the Waratahs’ member database and a few email reminders about who the ‘local’ NRC team is could make a difference to the crowd numbers in NSW. And it wouldn’t have cost them any more than a few hours of analysis ad email-drafting time.

The sad thing here is that I’ve copy-and-pasted this paragraph from last season’s wrap. Word for word.

The penny has to drop for the ‘Tahs. The other four states are utilising their membership databases to decent effect, but my understanding is that the four Sydney clubs have had to start from scratch and build their own support. It’s maddening, and even a touch self-defeating; surely it’s in the Waratahs’ best interest for the NRC clubs to succeed?

Ben Whitaker told me back in June that avoiding clashes was something they were really conscious of for this season, and particularly with the view of making all games accessible by the live streams. Sadly, that didn’t quite work out, with seven of the nine rounds featuring Saturday games either overlapping or in direct competition. In Round 8, we had a game in Canberra start at 2pm, and then two different games in Sydney kick off at 3pm.

It might not be possible to avoid clashes in all circumstances, but this situation certainly has to improve. It’d be great if Fox Sports could make the full game replays available within an hour of fulltime, too, rather than the loose ‘next day’ it was, or in some cases, not at all.

On that topic, I wonder how hard it would be for Fox Sports to make the live streams available via their red button option in 2016? Why wouldn’t you want to make it easier for your subscribers to see the games, rather than force them to create a separate online account for the website?

To finish up for 2015, I do believe something needs to be done around the quota of Super Rugby-contracted players each team is allowed, but I acknowledge it’s no simple fix.

A number of the Sydney-based coaches have been quite vocal about the evident advantages the likes of Canberra, Perth, Melbourne, and to an extent, Brisbane City get, and while they have some valid points, they also need to face some pretty obvious facts.

For one thing, even if the number was lowered from this year’s 14 to 8, say, to pluck a number out the air, there is simply no way that the Sydney clubs are going to be able to cherry-pick the cream of playing talent out of the Super Rugby player allotments. Super Rugby sides invest a lot of time and effort and resources into developing their players for Super Rugby; they’re not just going to give those players over to a semi-professional outfit for three months just because a player played juniors in the region for a few years.

Something does need to be done, don’t get me wrong, and there were some clear mismatches this season. But it’s not going to be as simple as just lowering the quota, either. For one thing, if Melbourne Rising – just for sake of example – have to choose between releasing their full contract fullback and another one in the EPS, why on earth would a Sydney NRC team really think they’d get the top line player? It just doesn’t work that way in professional sport.

As I said at the top, it’s been another really engrossing National Rugby Championship season this year, full of quality rugby, and some really promising talent emerging.

It’s already become a really important step along the Australian rugby development pathway, but there’s no doubt it can be better, too.

No doubt, I’ve left things out here, too, so please feel free to have your say on the NRC here today.