NRL draw will always be unfair but bye opens door for coaches to whinge more than ever

With the NRL set to lengthen the season and bring in three byes per team, an uneven playing field is about to be tipped even more askew. 

The addition of the Dolphins to the NRL means at least one bye each week and as soon as the draw is finally announced next month, stand by for a torrent of coaches claiming they’ve been hard done by.

With the competition all but certain to kick off on Thursday, March 2, it will also be the earliest start to a season since 2012 kicked off on the first of the month. 

The abolition of the standalone representative weekend in the middle of the season means the Grand Final will still be held in its traditional timeslot on the long weekend in Sydney on the first Sunday in October. 

Each team will still play 24 matches but have three free weekends over the 27-round season. 

(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

So, in simple mathematical terms, 17 teams with three byes equals 51 times where clubs aren’t playing over the 27 weeks of the season. 

The NRL is yet to confirm how the byes will be meted out but it’s likely to be one per round for the first couple and last couple of months of the season with three or more during the State of Origin period from late May to early July when player workload needs to be managed the most. 

There will be all sorts of argy-bargy behind the scenes between the clubs and the NRL over when teams are allocated their byes. 

One unlucky team will miss out in Round 1 – that coach will likely have a whinge about starting the season off behind the other 16 sides in the belief that it will then take them longer to shake off the off-season rust and get into the swing of the new campaign.

With Penrith and St Helens looking to bring back the World Club Challenge match next February, the Panthers should be the team that gets the week off to start the season, particularly if – as expected – they have to travel to the UK for the match. 

There’s also still the unresolved issue of the NRL trying to stage a match in the US before Round 1 – that would have been played in the last weekend of February with those two teams then not playing again until Round 2. However, with time running out for that match to be locked in, it’s looking more or more likely that it won’t happen until 2024.

If your team gets the bye in the next few rounds, that will inevitably lead to the coach blowing up because they lose momentum by having a week off pretty much as soon as they get back on the field. No club will want to have time off during this stretch. 

Then there will be Magic Round – one club will miss the boat for the three-day festival at Suncorp Stadium. The Dolphins have been assured they won’t be snubbed, which is commonsense as the Queensland-based teams are always the biggest drawcards in the now annual Brisbane festival of footy. 

And then there are all the byes that will need to be divvied out during the State of Origin period. 

Who gets byes before and after each match will be tallied up by each club with envy to see who will get the advantages of resting their representative stars without having to sit out a match on the schedule. 

Penrith, North Queensland, Melbourne, the Roosters and Brisbane had several Origin representatives in 2022 so they should be given priority during the mid-season schedule. 

(Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

And then the draw will include byes throughout the post-Origin period in the lead-up to the finals which again will give coaches plenty of reason to complain about when their team has to have another week off. 

Having the bye in the final round should be allocated to a team not expected to be in the playoff equation rather than a side like the Panthers, who sat out more than a dozen of their top-liners last season for a trip to Townsville as a freshen-up before the finals as they already had been presented the minor premiership trophy.

There are literally trillions of ways in which the NRL draw can be calculated and head office has about a one in a trillion chance of keeping all 17 clubs happy.

The only true way to have a fair draw is to have every team play each other twice. 

That has not happened since 1987 when it was a 13-team competition with only Illawarra and Canberra outside Sydney. 

There’s no way the NRL will cut the competition back to each team facing off just once as 16 matches per club will greatly devalue its asking price in broadcast rights negotiations. 

When the NRL expands to 18 teams, likely to happen in the next four or five years, it could be a chance to come up with a system that is as close to equitable as possible given the need to keep the length of the season around the 24-game ballpark per team. 

(Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

With 18 sides, you could then split the teams into two divisions based on ladder positions, snake draft style – one group would be the teams that finished 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16 & 17 with the other containing teams 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 15 & 18. 

Each team would play each other once to provide 17 rounds and then you would play the other eight teams in your half of the draw to fill a 25-round season.

You would then duplicate the draw the following year with the venues reversed in year two. 

This system was used when there was a 16-team competition and a 22-round format in the years leading up to the 1995 expansion to 20 teams before the chaos of the Super League war, culling teams, rationalisation, Souths getting the boot and then winning readmission in the courts, the return of the bye when they came back in 2002 and then the birth of the Titans a few years later to once again end the scourge of having an odd number of teams. 

As you can see, it can be quite complicated. 

Nobody likes having an odd number of teams. The quicker the ARL Commission can give the green light to an expansion to 18 teams the better so we can say bye-bye to the bye.