PREVIEW: 2024 Brisbane Broncos
Progressive modernism under the cover of nuclear hellfire
Any pretensions we may have had about the Penrith Panthers’ dynastic run have been obliterated. Their motivational fire has not been extinguished. Their will to win is that of a cyclone. They are become death, destroyer of worlds. The Panthers play an incredibly specific style of football and that has served them as the best team of the NRL era and perhaps? probably? the greatest of all time1.
It’s about energy expenditure, burning carbohydrates to produce wins. There’s lots of running, there’s lots of impact, there’s lots of tackling and there’s never, ever, ever any laziness. There’s also a lot of ineffectiveness and inefficiency in attack but that can be afforded when there’s a several hundred metre advantage and a couple of percentage points of possession that can be relied on each week.
The athletes Cleary the Elder has at his disposal can do this like no one else. While Vlandoball has something to answer for, the ‘20s Panthers would be one of the fittest rugby league teams ever to grace a field2. To be on the receiving end is about as interesting as drowning, or watching a mountain erode to a mound of dust: seemingly nothing happens for ages, then something dies. Elemental forces are all that’s comparable.
Kevin Walters and his Brisbane Broncos are modernists. They’ve undertaken a Manhattan Project and there’s no force of nature that can’t be solved with some nukes, whether that be mountains or hurricanes. Rather than get into the trenches and play the game on Penrith’s (or Parramatta’s or similar) terms, it’s easier to lob ICBMs from their own end, two or three at a time, and turn the opposition’s chances into a radioactive wasteland, glowing green glass, shadows where opportunity and football players once stood.
No team starts with a clean cut from the previous year, not even the Dolphins. And so the Broncos started 2023 with traces of the horrific collapse of 2022 in their game. They’d be slow to start, have lazy lapses in defence and fritter opportunities with errors - as ever, you saw it against the Storm in round 11 - but for the most part, in the last quarter of the game, the Broncos would turn the keys, enter the codes and there’d be a two score lead. Before you know it, we’re on the deck of the USS Missouri, celebrating VJ Day.
As the season wore on, the defence tightened, certain brains were slowed and the highlights reels were some of the fastest accelerating men in the game, scoring tries for fun from their own 40 metre line. The 2023 Broncos are responsible for some of the most mind-bending highlights in rugby league history, the kind where you shout “No! Don't do that!” before being made a fool. See: Cobbo vs Dolphins at the Gabba, Mam vs Knights at Suncorp, Farnworth vs Eels at the Gabba. It wasn’t perfect and we saw what goes wrong when the Broncos fired duds, as against the Titans in round 17. I thought that would happen a lot more than it did.
I’m not even convinced Brisbane believe in the concept of traditional running metres anymore. They’ve gone avant garde because sure, you can compile them eight metres and one tackle at a time but isn’t it much easier to blow the defence apart and run 60 metres in one go? Why venerate tradition so? That way lies reaction.
While the rest of the game is looking for yardage backs, the Broncos have let one of their key ones go to the City of Moreton Bay and replaced him with a guy that’s more in the mould of Cobbo and Walsh in Deine Mariner. They’re undoubtedly fast and skillful players and enthusiastic runners but they also rarely bend the line with the ball in hand to start sets. I hope Staggs has been doing his reps because he’s about to get a lot of carries.
Naturally, this characterisation of their field position strategy is an exaggeration, but only just. The Broncos could rely on one of, if not the, best pack in the sport to pulverise defences before bombing runs were launched, as against the Knights in round 15, and to give them plenty of close range shots at goal. Three current Origin players, one former Origin player and a rusty gate minted into a future Kiwi international comprised the starting rotation in 2023. Whether the rusty gate stays lubricated and whether former junior Origin players and also Fletcher Baker are good enough to maintain that peak of performance remains to be seen. Certainly, Flegler is a loss but not as important as Carrigan or Haas would have been and you just can't keep all those guys. Capewell had reached his used-by date, despite having an annoying habit of doing something very good every other week. Oh and Keenan Palasia has gone to the Gold Coast. Not sure I could pick him out of a lineup.
Was the 2023 grand final an inflection point in the way the game is played, in the same way the 2020 final proved to be in hindsight? Is trench warfare giving way to a nuclear blitz? You don’t have to play the game on their terms. There’s no substitute for speed, speed kills, etc. Whether this strategy proves successful will depend on the Broncos’ ability to keep defending. Conceding 18 points a game is fine if you’re going to score 26-plus but the best teams tend to be a few points tighter.
Or will the psychic mass of how that grand final played out blow up in their faces? It’s possible but to come back from the end of 2022 and put on 2023 makes me think that the end of 2023 will only spur them on to more of the same in 2024.
Irrespective, with highlights like this, who cares if they’re winning?
Guess: 16-8, 2nd
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Stats Drop
A refresher on the metrics. The projections are built from a weighted average of the last three years of player TPRs. It tends to extrapolate what has happened to the future, which catches most of the league, but it misses the occasional explosions. Last season, backs had an unusually productive year compared to forwards and while the numbers are adjusting to this potentially new reality, the system is in transition. As usual, 1-17 is as per League Unlimited with some tweaks to account for news since publication.
Regression: The Broncos had the second best points difference in 2023. Their Pythagorean expectation was equivalent to 16.5 wins, compared to 18 actual wins. If the Broncos play like a 16 win team again, we might expect only 14 or 15 actual wins. The Broncos will need to win at least 14 games to hit the overs on the disappointment line.
Projections: The Broncos project as ninth best in the NRL by per game Taylors. They are one of seven B-grade teams, i.e. projected to produce more than 90% and less than 95% of the Panthers’ projected per game production, the best of the Q4. There are three projected A-grade teams (Panthers, Rabbitohs, Storm - provided Ryan Papenhuyzen plays), one C-grade (Cowboys) and six D-grade (Dolphins and Titans).
Experience: The Broncos’ 1-17 has 44% of the career WARG of the top rated team by this metric (Rabbitohs, 74.2), and approximately one-third of that total was added in the last season. Only two players have more than five career WARG: Reynolds (8.7) and Haas (5.002). Walsh should join them by the end of the season, provided he plays a decent number of games.
Talent: The Broncos have a NRL-average distribution of talent, per pre-season TPR projections. Six players are projected to produce more than half the team’s Taylors: Walsh, Mariner3, Cobbo, Haas, Staggs and Reynolds.
Coach: Kevin Walters extracted more out of his players compared to the pre-season average than any coach in the league (coach factor of +8.9). His total coach factor from 2016 to 2023 is +9.5, which is now the fourth best in the league behind Bellamy (+33), Bennett (+20) and Cleary (+16). The Broncos have added 110 class Elo rating points since Walters took over, the fifth best current tenure in the league.
Other than the World Club Challenge.
Suspiciously so.
Mariner’s projection is huge and based on a tiny sample size. You could substitute his name for Mam in this list if Mariner performs more in line with expectations for a near-rookie in the NRL, i.e. nowhere near his projected output.