PREVIEW: 2025
Frankly, I have no idea.
Welcome to Pony Picayune, a monthly newsletter about the Brisbane Broncos.
Let’s just not have any expectations.
I’ve joked before that at least a few of the noble truths of Buddhism apply to rugby league as in life. I can’t sense any future in which having expectations about what the 2025 Brisbane Broncos are going to deliver is going to result in anything bar disappointment, so let’s take a deep breath and act accordingly.
The hard ass act we’ve been fed about Michael Maguire smacks more of marketing than anything of substance. The kind of fan the Broncos imagine they have - and the Courier Mail also shares this lazy view of the world - is expected to be impressed by Maguire cracking down on the show pony pop stars by making them wear their shirts. The irony is that the Broncos’ actual fans want Riki, Walsh, Carrigan, etc, etc to hit their back walls and are more than happy, slavering even, to see them sans shirts.
Except the training shirt mandate was enforced for sponsorship reasons, as revealed in a dull interview conducted with Peter Badel. Madge’s (I find his nickname cringe) posturing has much in common with Seibold - albeit less smug smartass and more tough love dad in tone - and I expect I will be wanting Walters back when that gets tiresome. That this, a retread whose methods may prove to be outdated very quickly, is meant to be the fresh new change in the organisation is mildly depressing. It might work. Let’s just see how it goes.
Part of the malaise is that I think rather than looking at 2023 as the expectation, it is the exception and cannot be relied on. Tristan Sailor serves as a clear example. He’s a guy I thought was not good enough in 2022, had a great year as a depth fill-in in 2023, returned to being a pumpkin in 2024 and is now in Super League with Keenan Palasia and Brodie Croft. Over a long enough time scale, the Dragons were eventually proven right, which is about the scariest thing I can conceive.
Sailor, like Riki, Walters, Hetherington, et al, all just happened to have great years all at the same time and it was enough to take the Broncos to within a quarter of a game of a premiership. It wasn’t enough then and when those guys returned to earth last year, it was never going to be enough. Kevin Walters paid the price for this fact with his job.
Ben Hunt would have been enough to put this team over the top in 2023, if only to limit the amount of time Billy Walters was on the pitch but unlike the signing of Tamika Upton, the 2025 men’s team is further away from that goal than many seem prepared to acknowledge. Hunt, the only really big signing in the off-season, has returned to Queensland to pick up a last pay cheque and cash in at one of the few places where being Dozer matters. While the Broncos will be better with him than without, it also doesn’t really fix the yawning chasm where the second row exists. If Piakura or Riki don’t work out well, or get injured, I’m not clear on if there’s a plan B or what it could look like. If that problem wasn’t immediately obvious at the start of 2024, it was certainly clear enough at the end.
At the other end of the depth conundrum, the Broncos have a half dozen hooking options. None of these are elite, although there is an opportunity for the right pairing to create an elite hooker in the aggregate. Whether its the possibly injured and unproven Mozer, the obstinate Paix, the Super League-bound Smoothy, the ex-nepo baby Walters, train’n’trial Eggerling or minutes from old man Hunt, there are far too many combinations and I can’t help but feel they’ll all be injured simultaneously at some point.
This is not a long preview, nor is it a fun, nuclear hellfire preview, even if we get a full 24 game slate of Reece Walsh. There are too many unknowns, too many problems that remain unresolved, too much mediocre recent football for any sort of picture to resolve into an uplifting clarity. Despite their history, their self-regard, their premierships, you won’t often go wrong starting with the assumption that the Broncos of the 2020s will be bog average and letting them prove you wrong. Wait for them to explode out of the gates but the truth will out later in the year.
Attention: Broncos fans
If you are planning on coming back for any future editions of the Pony Picayune and are not a paid subscriber, this is exactly where the paywall would be and you wouldn’t get all of the cool stuff that follows/an Ezra Mam essay that is way too long. I am showing you this one time so you can see what a paid subscription would get you.
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Deep Dive
The traditional Deep Dive into the 202X NRL season has been split up a little this year. Each of the Q4 will get theirs embedded in the longer season preview and then I’ll cover the rest of the league in a Stats Drop.
Explainers for metrics:
More about sims/PRVRS here.
The executive summary for the Broncos:
When projecting players forward, the next season’s stats normally look a lot like last season’s stats. Based on the past metrics, the Broncos played like a 10-win/12th placed team and did just that. Based on the future projections, the Broncos will play like a bottom half of the top eight team, probably around 6th or 7th. This is indicative of the degree of underperformance that 2024 served up.
The Broncos were dead last in net possession and second last in net metres. This is what we nerds refer to as ‘shooting oneself in the foot with a howitzer’. Giving opponents an average 200m head start and a heap more ball is not a winning strategy. Fixing this will go a long way to making the Broncos competitive again. Maguire will look like a genius if Brisbane revert to mean on ball handling ability.
Despite this, the Broncos performed merely poorly in defence, around the 12th to 13th mark, and at a slightly above league average level in offence, coming in around 7th place.
Other than the machine-like output of Pat Carrigan, many Broncos played with a floor close to their career levels but with a reduced ceiling from what we’ve come to expect.
According to the PRVRS ratings and the draw, the Broncos have a 51% chance of making the finals.
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Ezra Mam
I, for one, am glad that I did not feel compelled to race to the keyboard to broadcast my thoughts to the world after Ezra Mam crashed his car head-on into an Uber. There isn’t much to say about the accident itself, other than Mam is clearly a shitty driver and has an understanding of consequences that is common among 21 year olds. Other than the people involved in the accident, it doesn’t affect anyone else but if you were to gauge it by the reaction, Mam is the greatest villain in a sport that cheered the return of Jack de Belin, had an administrator be the focus of an episode of Four Corners in the 80s and holds Graham Langlands up as an Immortal. Don't forget Mitchell Pearce's canine antics, Todd Carney only pissed in his own mouth, etc, etc.
While it’s tempting to play a (very long) game of ‘yeah, well, but what about this other bag of dog turds that plays in the NRL,’ that’s not the point. Mam did wrong, is being punished by the legal system, the NRL and the Broncos. That punishment has been decided with respect to laws and precedents, and not just a little public outrage. That the punishment handed down by the rugby league portion of the judicial system has the flavour of ‘well, a kid getting hurt is worse than a racism but it’s still an accident, so I guess it’s eight weeks plus one and some cash’ is also immaterial.
I have several stories of being hit by cars while riding a bike. The most recent was a little over a decade ago and the people who pulled out in front of me were leaving a funeral and didn’t see me. The moral of all of those stories - not related in the interests of brevity - is that you can be killed by a car at any time just because someone is having a bad day, never mind the tired, the drunk, the distracted, the careless and the unlucky (see Sandon Smith). There is nothing special, unless you count multiple layers of stupidity on Mam’s part, about his case. It is as reckless as it is mundane.
Perhaps people were now confronting for the first time the idea that driving is the most dangerous thing you, and your family, do on a regular basis. Getting hit by a car travelling at just 50km/h as a pedestrian has a 90% fatality rate. In 2024, 168 people died on the job nationwide but 302 people were killed on Queensland roads. In contrast, a handful of people died from flying, all in light aircraft, and even fewer from sharks. Embarrassing yourself to death while public speaking recorded zero fatalities for the ten thousandth year running. So if I was being generous, I’d say some of the outrage is confusion born of cognitive dissonance as some people are starting to reckon with what car culture means for us, our lives and our cities and that there is a heavier price being paid than is generally believed. Here’s a barnburner of a primer and another if you’d like to know more.
In reality, the furnace was stoked by a few aggrieved racists - the man that made such a big deal of being called a monkey has his own flaws! - but mostly it was the off-season, it was the Broncos and, overwhelmingly, people thinking that get angry online is the same as doing something about the thing making them angry. Given that particular pump is nearly constantly primed by our society and media ecosystem, the output has to go somewhere. A lot of sound and fury signifying very little.
If you truly believe that laws and penalties should be changed, and that’s a reasonable view to hold, and aren't just positing some heroic things about yourself that won't hold up when we check the tape, then this is technically still a democracy. All those dead bodies and their families brought us to this point, so I don't know if one unlicensed P-plate rugby league player who did coke and injured three people will move the needle. This is a country that routinely locks up refugees from actual war zones. If one-tenth of that rage could be brought to bear usefully, we would have the road toll, domestic violence and climate change sorted out by next week. None of that resembles the reality in which we live.
The media’s coverage of the story was unhelpful. The story was extraordinarily confusing as journalists raced to print before Whatsapp groups could spread the (for a refreshing change, mostly correct) rumours. You needed to read both Ninefax and the Courier Mail every day to find out what was true enough about the accident to be printed without threat of libel. Then again, I imagine most people stopped at the headline, the photos and the broken hip that turned out not to be broken and decided that was enough for Mam to be hanged. Personally, I don’t feel generalised and hysterical outrage means we should bypass the principles of rule of law on which our society is built on but then again, I don’t think we’ll have to wait all that long for that to be business-as-usual.
Notable was the silence of former players, who were only too happy to come down on Jackson Topine but were unusually quiet over a player driving like an asshole with drugs in his system. Quelle surprise. Even the alcoholic professional opinion havers managed to keep the volume down, except for Phil Rothfield whose main beef was that the Broncos dropped a press release late on Friday night when he couldn't possibly be expected to do anything like copying and pasting that press release into an article. Then again, why risk a lawsuit with a spicy take when a lawyer went nuclear on TV and told everyone Mam was facing 14 years in prison?
Against all odds, Kia are continuing as the Broncos’ major partner, which should tell you all you need to know about this incident. If nothing else, Mam should be extremely relieved by that.
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Rewind
Let’s take a whirlwind ride through a bunch of guys who inspired the haircuts (including a Kirk Reynoldson) of the footy boofheads at my high school.
One of my old man takes is that the Broncos of the golden era really did play with a different attitude to their modern counterparts. You can see it in this game where a nascent Storm team that is not quite there take it to one of the best in the league. Melbourne lead 18-4 as time expires in the first half, only to be beaten by a simple Lockyer chip in behind the defence on the hooter. The Broncos are not phased to be playing from behind and turn the tide in the second half, capitalising on the noticeable fatigue of Cam Smith of all players, to come home 34-26 winners.
The Broncos would only win another half dozen times against the Storm in the 20 years that have since elapsed, including one grand final. Part of that is the Broncos’ almost mundane but very real and steely resolve seems to transfer from Brisbane to Melbourne.
Notes
Farewell to Corey Oates. You were an all-time great for this club and, despite your reluctance to commute to Burleigh, I’m glad you went before you became Darius 2.
Big M Signatures: Walsh (!), Hunt, Willison, Taupau, Football Operations Manager, and not Broncos but lol, Seibold.
Dub Signatures: Upton (!!!), Clark, Dam, Lafaele, McGrath, Rapana, Spreadborough
Injuries: Hayze Perham is on the Andre Savelio path
Roosters, Raiders, Cowboys and Dolphins is the kind of slate we’ve come to expect to start the Broncos’ season. One of the premiership contenders from last year (normally it would be the premiers but the Panthers seem to love Vegas). Then you get something more pedestrian (not even on FTA) followed by the now-traditional round 3 meeting with the Cowboys.
Brisbane Broncos give Star Entertainment sponsorship payment reprieve. It’s no secret that Star are on the brink of collapse but, for now, they are operational and paying their bills. The brain geniuses on Reddit insisted, if they were in that position, they’d cut Star loose. As if proof was required, these guys have never been anywhere near a big money deal. What do you think is better: Star being extremely likely to pay out at least half their deal and probably most or all of it but on a delayed schedule, or going to the market four weeks before the season starts, trying to find a sponsor at a similar level when everyone knows you’re desperate and having to reprint a bunch of shit to replace The Star logo? Take a lesson from Morris Levy: you take what you can get, because something is better than nothing.
‘Zero interest’: Broncos respond after intriguing report of UK Super League club takeover. It was a fun ride while it lasted (two days).
We have been denied Ben Hunt returning to the Ipswich Jets, reprising his role from one game against Norths in 2017, but Ben Hunt would look good in the red, white and green of Wynnum Manly.