Expect the unexpected when it comes to the NRL ladder

There has been a lot written this year about how even the rugby league competition is and how a lot of teams are sitting in false positions in the league.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard people say things like “who would have predicted that the Titans would be in the top four?” or “who would have thought that the Storm would be outside the eight!?”.

Well, I’m here to say that what has happened so far this year is normal and actually happens in most NRL seasons. So we really shouldn’t be surprised at all.

Of the current top eight sides, four were outside the eight at the end of the 2013 season. The Titans, Tigers and Panthers all missed the finals in 2013 and not many predicted they would do well at the start of 2014.

So, is this top eight turnover normal or is season 2014 a statistical outlier?

Looking back over the past 11 seasons since 2003, we can see that just less than half of the top eight turns over each year. Or, in other words, 3.45 teams per year end up in the top eight having finished the previous season outside the top eight.

A look back at each of the seasons shows that the most teams that finished inside the eight, having come from outside the eight, in any one season was five. That happened in 2010 when the Tigers, Panthers, Warriors, Roosters and Raiders all came from outside the eight in the previous season.

The season with the lowest turnover was 2004 when only two teams came into the eight having finished the previous season outside. The Dragons and Cowboys were the only ones to crack the eight that year, with the remaining six all having been in the eight the year before.

So based on the past 11 seasons, we can expect between three and four of the top eight to have come from outside the eight in the previous season. This makes 2014 a totally normal season so far. It’s great news for fans of the Titans, Tigers and Panthers, who can now confidently say that they wouldn’t be surprised if their team finished inside the eight

So, the next question is what does this mean for overall winners of the competition? Do they usually finish inside or outside of the eight in the previous year?

The short answer is no. While the top eight has a fair degree of turnover, the winner typically comes a higher finishing position the year before.

Over the past 11 seasons only three premiership winners have finished the previous season outside the eight the year before – the Panthers in 2003 (previous year 12th), the Tigers in 2005 (previous year ninth) and the Roosters in 2013 (previous year 13th).

The remaining eight teams all finished within the top eight, with seven of these finishing in the top four

The beauty of a salary-capped competition is that a bad season one year doesn’t have to mean a bad season the following year. So continue to expect the unexpected in regards to top eight composition, but we should probably stop short of backing teams that finished 2013 outside the eight to win the comp in 2014.