PREVIEW: 2024 City of Moreton Bay Dolphins
The Phins had the middle of the pyramid but not the apex or the base. Kippa-Ring has started to fill those gaps.
The Dolphins were 7-5 after round 13, the approximate halfway point of the 2023 season. The next dozen games would only yield another two victories and ten defeats. Of those ten defeats, five were horrific pantsings, two were respectable losses to the eventual grand finalists but three were losses by a total of just four points, including two against the two worst teams in the NRL. While a 9-15 season could have easily been an 11-13 season or even a split 12-12, it would not have been sufficient to make the finals, nor would it have it particularly changed the tenor of the campaign.
If you ignore the on-field results from June onwards, Redcliffe’s first season in the NRL was a success. Piling up the signature wins in the first half of the season was a stroke of luck - getting to nine wins by taking a scalp every two to three weeks would have seemed far less impressive - and by the time the focus shifted to Origin and then to finals, the Dolphins’ golden start was well established and the horror finish was of no consequence. We did get a firm understanding of what the Dolphins’ foundational philosophy was going to be and it was straight out of the Bennett School. Carrying a noticeable talent deficit to most of the league, the Phins served up a simple and stoic flavour of football most weeks.
The Red Fish would always take what you give them. Lacking an outstanding skillset, the offence wasn’t sparkling, except on the rare occassion someone decided to go off-script and Make Something Happen, but it could be effective. While the defence might be busy conceding a million points, the offence would generally make the most of the chances presented and at least put something vaguely respectable on the board.
But the defence was bad. It was really, really bad. There would be afternoons that clearly got away from the Dolphins very quickly and they’d punch in the clutch and roll home. They knew they weren’t getting to the post-season, most of them were being held together with Elastoplast and duct tape and it was better to save that energy to fight another day.
The Dolphins probably didn’t experience many more injuries than the typical NRL franchise goes through in a season but the drop-off in quality from the starting rotation to the next tier down of player was significant. Depth was their weakness, and that turned out to be problem for more than a few NRL sides in the expanded competition, while bearing in mind their starting lineup was good enough to have most pundits tipping the Dolphins for the spoon. Fortunately, there were too many other disasters-in-waiting and the Bennett School would be enough to make that an unrealistic prospect.
It was clear at the time, and moreso on a re-watch, just how bad the back five was. Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow started the season brilliantly and then began to fade as the Dolphins’ supernova ran out of fuel. My pet theory is that Tabuai-Fidow picked up a niggle mid-season and due to the absolute dearth of depth, soldiered on and his move to centre was part of managing the amount of load he had to take on. My less preferred but still plausible theory is that he can ride the highs but isn’t great at the lows, and his switcharound was a shot across the bows from Bennett to make an attitude adjustment.
While the injury crisis the Dolphins faced impacted the backline, there were often week-to-week changes in the back half of the season that seemed to be performance based, rather than health based, only to be reset a few weeks later. If there’s anything to criticise Bennett for, it’s this and consequently, making the job that much harder on the players.
Bringing Farnworth and Averillo to the centres for 2024 will immediately and massively improve the quality of this platoon. 2023’s top try scorer, Isaako will retain his spot in the #2 jersey, Tabuai-Fidow will return as starting fullback and so only the #5 jersey is up for grabs in a full strength Dolphins line-up. Whether that goes to Tesi Niu, and most readers will be already familiar with my feelings towards him, the young aerial threat of Jack Bostock, a slimmed down Valynce Te Whare or the bottom of the barrel options in Edrick Lee (2020 was an Olympic cycle ago) and Robert Jennings (remember that try he blew in the monster comeback against the Titans?), Bostock is probably the best pick long term but he will have to perform to keep his spot.
Having Te Whare and Aitken in the three-quarters depth chart and, theoretically, Nikorima or Farnworth being able to switch back to fullback, and O’Sullivan, Katoa, Nikorima, and Milford chasing two halves jerseys, and the bright but young prospect of Harrison Graham shadowing Jeremy Marshall-King is the kind of talent structure the club needs to build on to continue moving forward. The Phins had the middle of the pyramid but neither the apex nor the base but now Kippa-Ring has started to fill those gaps. It will not be an impenetrable defence in 2024 but the side will stand up better against the cyclonic conditions of the NRL than the inaugural version did.
With a vastly upgrade backline, a tuned up forward pack adding an Origin-calibre Tom Flegler and the return of Tom Gilbert, and a season under the belt of Katoa, all signs look promising for the Dolphins. Bennett’s last year tends to see clubs punch above their weight but the Dolphins might be a few kilos short of the finalists’ weightclass.
It feels more like a year of consolidation, a campaign of turning wins on emotion into wins on skill, and turning narrow losses into narrow wins, and keeping the beatings to under two dozen points. It may not feel like a leap forward, adding at most three wins and stuck in a purgatory outside the finals waiting room, but it’s a more stable foundation on which to build the Dolphins and their future.
Guess: 11-13, 12th
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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.
I haven’t included Elo charts for the Dolphins this year for the fairly obvious reason that we only have one season to chart.
Regression: The Dolphins had the sixth worst points difference in 2023, albeit it was better than the Raiders’, who made the eight. Their Pythagorean expectation was equivalent to 9.8 wins, compared to 9 actual wins. If the Dolphins play like an 11 win team, we might expect 12 actual wins. The Dolphins will need to win at least 11 games to hit the overs on the disappointment line.
Projections: The Dolphins project as 13th best in the NRL by per game Taylors. They are one of six D-grade teams, i.e. projected to produce less than 85% of the Panthers’ projected per game production, and the worst of the Q4. There are three projected A-grade teams, seven B-grade (Broncos), one C-grade (Cowboys) and five other D-grades (Titans, Raiders, Bulldogs, Dragons and Tigers).
Experience: The Dolphins are a moderately inexperienced team, with 58% of the career WARG of the Rabbitohs, which is 11th in the league. While Wallace (5.5) and Jesse Bromwich (7.7) are the most experienced by this metric, most of the really exciting players are in the range of two to four career WARG.
Talent: The Dolphins’ distribution of talent is marginally below average compared to the NRL average, with fewer of the top end players and more of the bottom. Six players are projected to produce more than half the team’s Taylors: Tabuai-Fidow, Isaako, Farnworth, Bostock1, O’Sullivan and Flegler.
Coach: Wayne Bennett extracted slightly more than league average out of his playing group compared to their pre-season expectations in 2023. His coach factor of +1 was the seventh best on the season and he has the second best in the NRL (+20) from 2016 to 2023. The Dolphins have lost 38 class Elo rating points during Bennett’s tenure, mostly due to being a first year expansion team, which is the second worst of the 14 current NRL tenures, mostly because the worse ones have been fired already.
Caution: in lieu of actual data, this assumes NRL average play from a rookie winger.