Love the idea Dutski, but it really does seem like using ‘average age’ is too simplistic given the small sample sizes. You could take out the outliers (although do you define that as 1 or 2 at each extreme?) or some sort of variation on the median age but they’re all too blunt given the size of the squads.

Only way I can really see this working is something around minutes played by each player & age as currently a 5 min cameo = 80 minute players.

Would love to see that plot!

That makes absolutely no sense.

Let’s drop the Dally M Winger of the Year for almost 2 entire seasons because he’s leaving after that so that we can play someone who is likely going to be inferior for the entirety of those 2 seasons.

Just because he’s leaving doesn’t mean he can’t provide a lot of value in that time and putting more time into an inferior player doesn’t at all guarantee they will ever become better than Suaalii is even right now (let alone what he will become over the next 2 seasons).

You can doubt it all you like, but it’s an objective fact that Walker and Sua’ali’i are on their rookie contracts. People like you aren’t even worth talking to.

See it’s this type of incredibly surface level thinking that makes this such a frustrating discussion to have.

The very, very obvious answer as to why more people want to play for the Broncos is that they are by far the most supported club in all of QLD due to their extremely long history and long term success compared to the 2 other clubs. The Roosters are one of 9 Sydney clubs in an area traditionally known for its support of Rugby Union.

If you don’t take even a second to try and understand stats then no one will take you seriously.

Using logic instead of emotion when talking about the Roosters? We don’t take kindly to your sort around here.

Walker and Suaalii are both on their rookie contracts so absolutely would not be on a “decent wage” in this context. Collins is on the last year of his original Roosters contract which was signed before he was a rep player so also wouldn’t be on anything huge.

That leaves Crichton, Keary, Manu, Radley, Smith and Tedesco which is right at the 6 you discussed. Exactly as many have mentioned, the Roosters (and Storm) are experts at putting a lot of money into some key, proven players and filling out the squad with younger players or journeymen. Honestly the conspirary theories are just so dumb and always have incorrect information or unfounded assumptions at their core.

Sealing a QF berth means they made it to the quarter finals, not that they won it. You had quite an aggressive response given you don’t know basic sports terminology

Honestly if he wasn’t such a game-changer when he’s in form and not losing his head he’d already be gone. I really do hope he can keep it together because when he’s playing well Radley is a someone than can take us from good / very good to great and we’ll need that if we are any chance of knocking off the Panthers and Souths / Melbourne to a lesser extent.
.
No offence intended to Sharks / Eels / Cowboys but I just see the other 3 as the teams with the highest ceiling right now.
.
Obviously we have other game-breakers who can win with individual brilliance but Radley can add a whole different dimension to our game that makes our whole structure that much more dangerous.

Agreed Mushi. I’m seeing a lot of it both here and in other places and it just confuses me a bit. Past team & individual success, the fact that the best coaches in the game want him, inidividual accolades, the fact he’s still in his physical prime and is allowed to specialise in his preferred position – literrally everything points to this being a solid-at-worst buy and a potentially game-changing one.

I’m guessing it’s largely down to people generally disliking the Roosters and a bit of ill-will towards Smith based on some his behaviour around the team-change. But who really knows?

Either way, there is no real legitimate case to make that Verrils at his best is better than Smith at his most mediocre and that’s not even including the injury issues.

Fingers crossed he’s the missing piece we needed this year!

Tough to take your opinion seriously when you don’t even know which team Verrils is playing for this year. Doesn’t exactly present you as someone who cares too much about facts before they form their opinion.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you actually do know which team he’s playing for, the competition for “best player” at the Roosters is significantly higher than it is at the TITANS. The Roosters can put out close to an all-representatitve starting 13 and the Titans have twice as many bottom 4 finishes as they do top 8 including 13th place last year.

Very silly argument.

Not sure I follow the logic here..? Marnus is the #1 ranked batsmen in the world and is clearly the best option for 3 and Smith is the #2 ranked batsmen and clearly the best option for 4. Smith has at least a few years in him and Marnus probably has 5+ years.

Green is very good and has the potential to be phenomenal, but I don’t see anything that screams ‘3 or 4’ about him other than the fact he is from WA. Silly, silly comment to be honest.

Well that was a very unrelated and strange response, but I’d expect nothing less from you, OJ.

You honestly can’t even keep your mouth shut about Hooper for this one article? Good god you are pathetic.

That’s some truely baffling logic.

Wouldn’t that effectively make anyone in a minority group of any type effectively immune to valid criticism because someone, somewhere is using the issue to justify their racist / homophobic / xenophobic etc behaviour?

This is just silly. McReight is currently a borderline starter at international level.

Hooper is literally a season removed from being arguably the form player in the entire world where he secured his second nomination for world player of the year. He’s also a 4 x John Eales medal winner (all time record), including the last two. As a reminder, this is voted by his peers who I trust just a tiny bit more than I trust you on these things.

McReight may well get to that level and I honestly hope he does, but at the moment based on international performances it isn’t even close and it’s silly to suggest otherwise. I don’t know why this is such a tough concept to be honest.

I said largely positive and generally fair, not always positive and always fair.

Hooper had people on literally every article that mentioned him (and plenty that had nothing to do with him, like this one) saying that he was useless and the sole reason for any poor performances by the Wallabies. I mean there were plenty of comments after he was best on ground in Wallabies wins or when he was nominated for world player of the year that still claimed he was an ineffective midget.

If you can’t see the difference in commentary I just don’t know what to tell you.

Nah you’re just wrong here.

I think if this happened to the ABs there would be a good chunk of supporters who weren’t overly unhappy to see them on the wrong end of a poor decision but would still believe it was a ‘technically’ correct.

That’s what happens when you’re the undisputed best team in the world for the best part of two decades who are also notoriously good at game / ref management. People like to see decisions go against you.

That doesn’t mean there is any bias when it comes to how fans would feel about the actual validity of the decision. And it definitely doesn’t mean that the Wallabies have any special place in the minds of the global rugby community when it comes to ref decisions.

Hooper is probably the single most polarising player in the history of The Roar. He constantly had a group of commenters who said he could do nothing right no matter what.
.
By contrast, I’d say the vast majority of discussion around McReight has been extremely fair and largely positive. He’s had both praise and criticism in fair amounts relative to his performances and the stage of his career.
.
Your comment is so indicative of someone who is biased so can only assume everyone else is biased too. Like why even bring up Hooper here?? And I’m particularly confused about why you bring up Foley and compare his tackling stats as a starting 10 to a backup 7… Is it possible you don’t like the Waratahs?

But that’s the point, it wasn’t over 80 minutes. You can’t compare a starter who is expecting to play a full game against someone coming on late who knows they only have 30 minutes to play. He’s also playing against tired players or other reserves instead of fresh starters. Sure, can pretend to be non-biased and add a hypothetical ‘drop off’ but that still completely misses the point.

I’m honesty a bit confused as to why there is any debate around the call.

Was it technically correct? Maybe, I guess. The law is pretty vague.

Should Foley have kicked it earlier? Yes.

Did he hear the ref calling time back on? Maybe. Did the ref need to call time back on? No.

Should we crack down on time wasting? Yes.

Is the right time to ‘crack down’ on the ‘scourge’ of time wasting in the 79th minute of a Bledisloe Cup game? Absolutely not.

Does anyone think that this was actually the start of a ‘crack down’ on time wasting? No.

It was an unprecedented decision that had the potential to hugely effect a game (and eventually did) in a way that far, far outweighed the offence.

I wrote a long comment above digging into it a bit more, but honestly now that I’ve read your comment I really shouldn’t have bothered as your comment pretty much sums up the core of the issue here. Just an extremely unfocusesd and overall weird article that tries to conflate serious & legitimate issues in sport / society with a relatively fair response to some clearly poor behaviour. Having said that, I do agree that I’m not a fan of boo-ing myself but I also understand it’s just part of sport and we don’t need to pretend it’s something worse than it is.

I’m sorry but I’m just not following your logic here. How can you say that comparing this situation to the appalling, widespread and outwardly race-based abuse of Adam Goodes is ‘justifiable’ and in the next sentence say that there is no evidence that the booing was driven by racism?
.
Let me preface the rest of this by saying that I have absolutely no doubt that there is a (hopefully small) subset of the crowd that were booing for racial reasons. You’d be silly to think otherwise.
.
The Goodes situation was honestly a stain on our society and consistented of long term, consistent crowd ABUSE across multiple teams and many months and was largely ignored by the powers-that-be for a significant period of time.
.
While I’m sure that really terrible things were shouted at him amongst a crowd of 40k+, I’d very much struggle to see an argument that this amounted to “abuse” in any real way compared to what Goodes faced. There have also been no specific allegations of any racial slurs and if you don’t think that this would come out quickly given the current social environment then you haven’t been paying much attention.
.
This was also a largely isolated incident in a heated clash between two of the games biggest rivals.
.
Oh also, did I forget to mention that Latrell smashed his mates face in and remained actively unapologetic both within the game and after (there were some comments he made about calling to apologise but that’s about it). This incident and his behaviour after was pretty much universally condemed across the broader fanbase which is a rare thing in this sport. This was the first game they had played again and it was a week before the finals and a serious grudge match. It’s honestly just absurd to even begin to compare the two.
.
Despite all this, I believe I understand the deeper point you are trying to make and broadly agree, but you’re doing yourself no favours when you write like this. From what I saw and read, Latrell was not talking about the broader issues, he was largerly focused specifically on the Roosters game and there is simply no way to compare this to what Goodes suffered through. The article could have been far more impactful without trying to justify this honestly terrible comparison. Simply saying “The comparison was probably not justifiable but points to a larger issue in the sport” completely changes the credibility of the article (at least in my eyes, this is just an opinion).

I mean.. what?

He won the Clive Churchill medal in 2018 when he carried the playmaking in a team where Cronk had a broken Scapula and won again in 2019 while only missing out on Origin due to an injury..

He was also a second year player in the 2014 Rabbitohs premiership while playing with Reynolds or ‘rennolds’ as you said.

What a stupid comment.

Ahaha sure thing champ.

I’ve been a poster on this site for literally half a decade with close to a thousand comments (which you could have checked if you had bothered to take a second). I’m pretty clearly not Homer.

Not gonna bother with the rest of your post as you can’t bother doing the bare minimum to confirm your accusations so I don’t believe you’d bother to do any other research either.