Say “seven hundred million dollars reasons to smile” out loud
Say “seven hundred million dollars reasons to smile” out loud
Guessing the ladder, guessing which coach is getting fired and re-acquainting ourselves with an old friend I like to call "inflation"
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Titans will round out this week and QCup/QRLW next week and then we’re into the actual goddamn season. Finally.
Rating the coaches
A fun bit of content I did before the pandemic was charting the change in class Elo rating for every NRL and Super League club by each coach’s tenure. Good coaches made things better and bad coaches didn’t. Interestingly, once coaches lost about 50 rating points from their starting point, they were almost inevitably, but not necessarily immediately, fired. Less than that and the tailspin was recoverable.
Ahead of the 2022 season, based on this rule of thumb, I set the line for coaching firings at 4.5. That year, Maguire, Barrett, Hasler and Brown were all let go. I’d argue the Titans should’ve punted Holbrook too, so it was a moral victory for the overs. Last year, we lost Holbrook, Sheens and Griffin, all well overdue, doubly so for Sheens who should never have been hired in the first place. Now let’s check who hired him… oh… well, at least he got fired too.
With the slate wiped clean, it’s hard to envisage anyone getting fired in 2024.
The -50 thing is a rule of thumb, not a rule, and the key is that the firing doesn’t happen immediately once the threshhold is crossed. To be fair, Souths’ rating at the start of Demetriou’s tenure was the highest of any new coach in the NRL era. The only comparable situation was Geoff Toovey taking over Manly in 2012 as defending premiers. That didn’t go especially well for the Sea Eagles but Toovey was given four full seasons and lost 77 points, which is in the bottom ten tenures in the NRL era. We’re only two seasons into Demetriou’s time, so unless the Rabbitohs post single digit wins, I’d expect him to still be there in 2025 but with a warming seat if he doesn’t post serious results.
Bennett’s rating is also not quite reflective of reality. By convention, new teams are given a 1500 rating, so while 9-15 was well above most expectations for the Dolphins’ inaugural season, it’s not good enough to maintain a 1500 rating. There a more than a few coaches in the first year of the NRL whose teams likewise should never have been rated so highly. Bennett is out at the end of this year in any case, handing over to Kristian Woolf.
That means the worst positioned coach is really Cameron Ciraldo, with just a -5 loss. If the Bulldogs go as badly as I expect, he’ll be gone by the end of the year but he’d need something like at least eight or nine wins to stay employed at Canterbury-Bankstown. Even that doesn’t sound impressive enough on paper. Given the returns are lower than under Hasler, I’d be punting Seibold if I was Manly but he’ll probably survive another season.
Everyone after that looks pretty safe. Brad Arthur will come under scrutiny if the Eels fail to live up to any reasonable expectation again this year and his accured points are inflated by picking up the pieces of the Eels when their rating was sub-1400, which should probably be it’s own category of coach expectations. Take note, Webster and O’Brien.
Let’s set the line at 1.5 coaches fired for 2024.
Another fun way of looking at coaching performance is to compare their players’ post-season TPR with their pre-season projection, account for league-wide inflation and ascribe half of the difference to the coach in a number I call Coach Factor. Here’s 2023:
And here’s what that looks like over the last eight seasons:
I personally thinks that passes the eye test.
(Worth noting that the 2020 Dogs and the 2023 Titans were ascribed to no one due to the coaches being fired really early in the year)
Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer
“Aren’t you blokes interested in finance?”
(I’m aware my readership isn’t exclusively blokes but I’m fairly certain this is a quote from Mike Colman’s Super League book but damned if I can find it)
I, for one, can’t believe Peter V’Landys, Kate Jones and Megan Davis were re-elected as commissioners. I am also surprised that I missed the vote deciding who can run an important national cultural institution. This used to be a democracy.
As PVL took a victory lap on a vote that had the same uncertainty of outcome as a Turkmenistani presidential election and threw in some tiresome dick measuring with the AFL for good measure, much has been made of how he personally is going to sell a Watch NRL subscription to every man, woman and child in the western world. I note that he’s not brave enough to mention China.
Failing that, he’s going to buy Super League, return it to a winter comp so Kayo has some summer rugby league content that just as many people will watch as do now. Turning the English game into summer state cup will finally put an end to the persistent English threats to Australia finally embracing a Panthers dynasty they neither wanted nor asked for.
Then asking the PNG government nicely to let Australian and NZ players who do move to Port Moresby to play for the hypothetical NRL franchise dodge PNG’s 42% marginal income tax on their salaries seems like the most V’Landys solution possible to any problem.
Oh and he totally 100% backs Abdo and has no desire to crown himself Emperor Peter the Great the Short as a combined chairman-CEO.
That’s a lot of PVL-based content given the season kicks off this weekend. Given how mind-numbing most of the Vegas content has been, personally, I'd like to talk about the game’s finances. Sue me.
From the CM:
ARL Commission boss Peter V’landys says the game will buy up even more hotels as part of his ‘NRL Monopoly’ masterplan to make the sport a $1 billion empire…
V’landys revealed the hotels will generate a return of around 10 per cent per year, and also a return on capital - underlining the NRL’s fiscal strength ahead of their historic 2024 premiership kick-off in Las Vegas next week.
“The more hotels you have, you can spread your fixed costs over more properties with greater expertise and the return is greater,” V’landys said.
“At the moment, if you put your money in cash you get about four per cent if you want no risk, and we do ‘no risk’.
“Our hotels are going to generate an excess of 10 per cent return per annum and that’s not including any capital growth. Gambaros has already significantly increased in capital growth. So it’s a dual return. It’s not just the annual return, it’s a capital return.
“Any investment we make has to be more than what we get from cash.”
More hotels! I revise my earlier statement, this is the most V’Landys solution possible to a problem. 10% returns sounds good if it can be sustained and isn't just a blatant lie no one will ever be able to check. Curiously the purchase prices are not published, so we’re just left to assume V’Landys got a good deal, despite all the historical evidence. It’s also less than the S&P 500 went up over the last 12 months (~25% plus dividends) but I’m no accountant.
Also, the News sub-headline was “Peter V’landys has $700m reasons to smile”. Say “seven hundred million dollars reasons to smile” out loud.
From AAP via The Guardian:
Surplus is marginally down – from $62.9m in 2022 to $58.2m for the following year – but the figure is the second best recorded since the creation of the ARL Commission in 2012.
This is the most raw dollars that the NRL has claimed as a surplus and ostensibly that’s a good thing to wield power and prestige in our capitalist system but I’m going to talk about loser nerd shit. This is what you came for.
In real terms, 2013 was more profitable than 2023, with a bigger surplus when adjusted for inflation and a better return on revenue. I know it’s a bit much to expect people to understand what inflation is after a decade-plus of it basically being zero but it’s back. Inflation is also important context because if you want to criticise those administrations, and you should, it’s that they lacked the guts to follow through on anything, but the way it’s presented by the hacks, you’d think the NRL had never cleared a profit before.
We’ve also heard the sob story about how the game was going to go broke in covid and we know its not true. The NRL finished 2019 with $180 million in the bank, which is an asset the game had and would’ve been impressive to have blown through in any reasonable timeframe that the pandemic might have lasted, with or without the on-field product.
The problem isn’t that the NRL is making money. The problem is for an organisation like the NRL (and, by extension, the ARLC of which V’Landys is chairman) making money shouldn’t be an end in and of itself. The point of making the money is to do something with it for the benefit of rugby league. It is highly questionable that the best use of that money is to buy real estate off well connected people and shovel cash to the NRL clubs to overpay mediocre second rowers.
As has been pointed out repeatedly, those profits have been built off killing the digital arm, which didn’t use to just peddle sycophancy and was good, profitable and was going to decrease the NRL’s reliance on traditional broadcasters; cutting funding to the state bodies, which is the subject of legal action; and slashing the headcount at headquarters. Elon Musk has shown that 90% of the staff at a company can be fired and still have a functioning product, but no one would say Twitter is good any more.
The NRL’s main product is the NRL but it is not its only product. The NRL, ARLC and associated bodies also make other kinds of rugby league but they’ve been abandoned in the rush to sell you shallow and homogenised rugby league as the real thing.
We’re now at over $160 million cleared over the last three years and the plan seems to be to buy hotels. You, the fan, ultimately create that money with your time (watching ads) and money (buying merch and subscriptions) but have no say in how that is spent. I’m almost certain that most people would think the obsession with hotels comes off a little strange but want that money returned in some form to their club. Fine, I get that.
I would suggest there are better places for that money to be spent than turning the NRL into an ever more effective Skinner box to part you and your money. In fact, at $160 million over three years, you can afford to do both.
I’ve run out of room to go through the annual report in detail. We’re also waiting for the lawsuit of the centruy to drop, which was supposed to be last Friday, unless I misread AAP’s reporting. So all that, conferences and anti-siphoning will have to wait until later this week or maybe next week, while we try to do some football-adjacent content.
Guessing the ladder
This is a fool’s errand. Here’s me holding myself accountable for 2023 and acknowledging now, that even since as recently as September, my views on several people have changed.
Here’s 2024 foolishness:
You can read the rationales for the Q4 in the preview posts and I spent all of 15 minutes compiling this and then another five hedging my bets with the plus-minus column. I’ve spared you the roster ratings because that would require paying attention to transfers to NSW clubs. The coaches got their own section.
Given how low the Tigers are, a huge improvement doesn’t so much move them up the ladder so much as rejoin the tail of the field. Manly are going into second year Seibold with a Swiss cheese roster. The Bulldogs are on the verge of collapse unless Stephen Crichton is the second coming (he might be) and the Dragons are already collapsing. The race to see which one ends up at the bottom will be what I keep an eye on during the soggy period between the end of Origin and before finals, presuming it's not decided well before then.
There’s a dozen teams that could make the finals, although I think it will almost certainly be too far for the Dolphins and that was before Gilbert’s ACL ruptured. I’m anticipating a Knights capitulation. One good season after a couple of rubbish ones, with Dom Young leaving and a Hastings/Gamble halves combo and a coach I still don’t trust screams disappointment. The Raiders are taking on the blue stuff at a rapid rate and can’t rely on treading water forever. The Sharks will hinge on the effectiveness of their attack and whether the rest of the league has seen enough tape to shut them down because we all know they can’t defend. More on the Titans tomorrow.
Souths, who despite being pretty average last year are still on my “good until proven otherwise” list, Parra and NQ to reverse the weird quote-unquote bad luck of 2023 and pinch finals spots. I inserted the Roosters into the top five because they need to deliver the bounceback I’ve been waiting for since 2021’s horror injury run. I think that Andrew Webster is a good coach but I’m not sure if that’s just coming off a low base of expectations. The Storm define the “good until proven otherwise” list. Ezra Mam and Reece Walsh lobbing ICBMs. The Panthers’ dynasty will never end.
So, basically, the same as last year. Not a lot has changed so I’m not expecting a mjor sorting out of the hierarchy. There will be surprises up and down, there always are, but most of the teams will stay right where they are.
Intermission
Your seemingly annual reminder why we play the games.
NRL: This is simply the greatest team of the modern era. We've thrown our biggest clubs at them - Souths, Parra and Brisbane - and none have managed to stop them in three years.
Super League: What if we sent wave after wave of English farmers, teachers and plumbers that tried really hard at a quarter of the salary? Did you think of that? Maybe we should be buying you.
Enjoy it, Wigan fans. If Panthers fans try to blame a loss in a game they should have won by 20 on the ref and not their terrible fifth tackle options, you'll understand why Australia generally hasn't gotten behind the Panthers dynasty. Also, Dylan Edwards looks like Peter Dutton.
Upcoming Slate
NRLM - Roosters vs Broncos in VEGAS BABY, Sunday 2.30pm
The second of the equally stupid and spectacular Vegas games that’s going to look very weird with a narrow field, 75% empty seating and men in short shorts playing. Based on last year, I would expect the Broncos to have won this but given it’s round 1 and in Vegas (not the good, Briz kind of Vegas), anything can happen. The Roosters didn’t exactly aim up against the Dolphins in 2023, so here’s hoping they have yet another slow start to a season. Tip: Broncos
QRLW - Magpies vs Wynnum at Logan Metro, Saturday 7pm
Despite the senior state comps kicking off next weekend, the QRL website has this scheduled for Saturday night, 7pm. I assume this is not a mistake. The Mags and the Gulls were two of the heavyweights of last year’s competition, with the minor premiers meeting the runners-up. The previous meeting was a two point semi-final, won by Wynnum thanks to Julia Robinson being the only white girl that can jump. Both rosters are extremely strong again coming into 2024 and given my general excitement about the competition, I am really looking forward to this. Tip: Wynnum
[The Watch Guide will return next week]
Weather - Las Vegas on Saturday (local time) will be windy and dry, 8 - 17°C, but that doesn’t matter because Allegiant Stadium is indoors. Logan on Saturday will be mostly sunny, 21 - 33°C.
Notes
Payne Haas feels empty without a premiership ring. I don't think that's what will make you feel whole, Payne, because traditionally, that was the remit of religion or at least family. Try having a wife (or husband, it’s 2024!). In the meantime, hopefully a NRL Preseason Challenge™️ trophy will suffice after the Broncos beat the Sea Eagles, 40-14, in Sydney to take home the least valuable prize in professional sports and $100k the News Corp-owned Broncos don't need. Warriors beat the Dolphins, 34-22, in Auckland. Cowboys beat the Raiders, 36-26, in Queanbeyan. Eels beat the Titans, 26-16, in Ipswich.
Adam Reynolds extends another year, pushing back the dreaded future where Jock Madden attempts to be the week-in, week-out halfback until Coby Black ages into the NRL.
Luciano Leilua has been released by the Cows. “I don’t recall saying ‘good luck’,” said GM of Football, Michael Luck.
Redcliffe Dolphins 2024 season launch. Ben Ikin: “The Broncos are a manufactured, made-up organisation that was created through a consortium. This place is a proper footy club.” Alright, jeez, settle down. “One’s not right and the other wrong, it’s just different.” Righto.
Stats: Another attempt at projecting NRL player value for 2024
While we’re waiting for the lawsuit of the century, refresh your understanding of the 2022 case with ACPNS Legal Case Notes Series: 2022-72 New South Wales Rugby League Limited v Australian Rugby League Commission Limited instead of my garbled reindition.
Not Queensland: NSWRL says they could have Fiji, Samoa and Tongan teams in NSW Cup. Also Dino Mezzatesta was trying to get on the board again last Friday.
Campo: Chevy Stewart, Ben Te Kura, Tyrone Munro among five NRL youngsters set to make their mark in 2024
Food for thought (not really): 10 reasons league and union should merge to become One Rugby - and give AFL nightmares. Not really much point in merging with something that’s going to be dead in 5 years?
Amelia Kuk is back for Norths! Leivaha Pulu and Asher O’Donnell sign for the Tigers. Shaniah Power is back for the Cutters. Steph Hancock goes to the Clydesdales.
PNG Hunters home games remain as scheduled for the time being.
Not Queensland: Leigh is set to lose star hooker Edwin Ipape for at least the next few months with a knee injury. Booooooooooo!
I have realised that Broncos vs Cowboys at Suncorp is on Good Friday. The NRL has royally screwed loyal Brisbane rugby league fans once more by ensuring nothing is open on game day for the biggest match of the season. Good stuff.
Incredibly specific content:
