Uncomfortable writers doing vertical video
And a poorly predicted ladder
Welcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland and rugby league in Queensland.
Not a deep dive
This is my tenth season writing about the NRL and every season, I’ve done the season preview a little bit differently. Some years I do a lot of writing. Some years I do a lot of numbers. Some years I do both (e.g. part 1 and part 2) but more recently, I usually have done very little writing and let the vibes run.
The overall question for 2026 is: are there any Good Teams? Every year since 2018, there has been at least one, if not two or three, Good Teams that have dictated the terms of the premiership. Good Teams have weaknesses but they are usually minor enough to be managed by coaching tactics on the way to a 19-5 regular season and a deep finals run.
2025 was defined by a wide open premiership, similar to 2018. The games were as unpredictable as any in NRL history. Every team seemed to have at least one glaring weakness that could be exploited by the rest of the competition. The premiers won their finals games by a combined margin of seven points, after being down dozens at various stages of those games.
Surely we won’t be treated to that again.1 If we expect a reversion to a more typical season, who are the clubs that are likely to step up to Good Team status? I am reasonably confident that I know who it is not going to be, but other than the Panthers and the Storm, any other team putting it together to really contend this decade usually has an element of surprise. I think this group is the Sharks, Bulldogs, Broncos and Roosters with very, very outside chances for the Rabbitohs and Dolphins. You could make a case for the Raiders but the other eight is outside looking in and its only February.
Here’s a predicted ladder that I refuse to be held to and the logic, loosely defined, as to how I arrived at each team’s position:
17. Sea Eagles (wish casting and high confidence): Seibold is the prime hot seat candidate and he has a roster that looks like a big fart sounds. We could save a lot of time, and Trbojevic’s knee and ankle ligaments, by firing Seibold and giving them the spoon now, as Manly auto-forfeits through the season.
16. Titans (high confidence): The worst team that won’t fire its coach. The roster is too QCup, even for my taste.
15. Cowboys (high confidence): Wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see these guys slip below the Titans even. More on Thursday in the first Bovine Bulletin of 2026.
14. Knights (helmet analysis): Justin Holbrook, who coached four (4) losses where the Titans were leading by at least 20 points, took the Knights into a coal mine during the offseason. The image of Holbrook’s bunch of effete footballers that have never had an office job, let alone done manual labour, coming back with Zoolander black lung seems hard to get past. So I am not expecting heaps this season. Or ever, really.
13. Tigers (helmet analysis): After another off-season of board room ridiculousness, where does the impetus to move Wests up the ladder come from? Koroisau has gone quiet. Luai is at his maximum capacity. Marshall doesn’t have any experience to fall back on. Breakout Bula? The rest of the roster isn’t much better than Manly. Every team has a few good players but the rest of the Tigers are, best case, development prospects
12. Warriors (high confidence): I don’t think the Warriors are very good and I don’t think the Webster Warriors have ever really been that good. People want the Warriors to succeed but losing two (2) good players derailed their entire season in 2025, one of whom is still injured. Good teams have depth because those kinds of injuries happen. Bad teams show these kinds of frailties. Other than that getting pantsed at Suncorp in 2023, what have they shown? A massive outperformance of Pythagorean expectation in 2025? The Wahs are on a similar trajectory to Payten’s Cowboys.
11. Dragons (low confidence): By a process of elimination, I ended up with the Dragons in the top eight because I wanted the Storm to miss the finals but I just can’t make it stack up, even for the purposes of having a hot take for the sake of having a hot take. Even this feels preposterously optimistic for a team with nothing in particular to recommend them as St George Illawarra remain the least interesting franchise in the NRL, except when they do something catastrophically stupid.
10. Rabbitohs (medium confidence): I’ve done a couple of season previews with Souths by helmet analysis and expecting them to be good and they have not delivered. I don’t know if Bennett has his fast ball anymore - last year’s coaching performance was not just subpar but the worst of anyone who wasn’t fired - even though he probably has some decidedly noxious stuff for maybe two big games a year. On the other hand, the injury luck has to turn, so maybe they keep their stars on the field and put up some wins. In all likelihood, you probably get both experiences.
9. Raiders (medium confidence): Canberra fans better get used to hearing “reversion” a lot this year. It won’t be used properly, instead doubling as code for “not winning as many games as last year”, but it’ll be said a lot. The Raiders’ 19 win minor premiership was worth 15 wins by Pythagorean expectation. Those four wins over have to be paid for.2 If the Raiders meaningfully improve and play like a 19-win team (this is not my baseline scenario), then we’d expect 15 to 17 wins, and still looking like a contender, despite underperforming their Pythag. If the Raiders play like a 15-win team again (this is much closer to my baseline), we’d expect 11 to 13 wins and maybe scraping into the finals. That’s reversion to the mean. It relies on the idea that there is a true level to this team that we might be able to devine through haruspicy, astrology and advanced statistics but as this is the Raiders, we leave that in the hands of the fates.
8. Storm (vibe): I don’t think the Storm will be very good this year. Certainly not by their own lofty standards and perhaps not even in an absolute sense. Unfortunately, this seems to be a commonly held position but I don’t mind feeling silly about this when they rip off a 24-0 season.
7. Dolphins (talking myself into it): The Dolphins will land in the zone marked “12 to 14 wins” but where that sticks you on the ladder is anyone’s guess. See also: Raiders. A finals berth would be good. Some upside risk of being really good.
6. Eels (medium confidence): Things are about as good as they get in Parramatta. Mitchell Moses, 31, will be coming to the end of his career in the next five years, they have lost sex pest Dylan Brown (fine) and instead have Jonah Pezet for a single season instead. Dumdum Lomax may be swapped for [insert Storm player here], although that’s looking less and less likely, which means the Eels at least have some self-respect. Some tooling around the edges and given the state of the competition last year, Eels fans would be forgiven for wondering, “why not us?”
5. Bulldogs (medium confidence): The Bulldogs have blown it. At least in the sense of they had a very winnable premiership in 2025 - the Raiders won the minor premiership with 19 wins, for god’s sake - and opted to build to win future, less tangible premierships. They had an elite defence through the back third of 2024 and first half of 2025 - coughing up a 16 point lead to the Broncos in round 18 is something of a turning point - so there might be something there if they can avoid giving up 40+ to the Panthers in a final but they need to figure it out quick. Otherwise, Ciraldo is starting to look real tired.
4. Roosters (helmet analysis): Probably good? Due a decent year, which is the kind of thing we say about teams that are well run by reputation but haven’t had the results to back it up. Roster looks more complete than a lot of their rivals. I still don’t really believe in Sam Walker. Lil Spenny Lenny is still a fraud.
3. Broncos (high confidence): They’re going to be more relaxed but not as hungry. Given the underlying talent, that will balance out to a pretty good team but not necessarily a premiership winner. Upside is if there is some magnified Origin effect where they’ve been through heaven, hell and everything in between so nothing can stop them now?
2. Panthers (helmet analysis): Expecting another solid-to-good performance taking them to a preliminary final. Dylan Edwards stinks. Nathan Cleary has better protection than the black rhino.
1. Sharks (medium confidence): Maybe this is the season they put it all together and that feels as likely for Cronulla, who have at least demonstrated that they have all the puzzle pieces, as any other team in the league. The Panthers proved you don’t need a special fullback to win the comp. KL Iro was one of the top rated players by Stats Drop stats last year. More of that and a bit more out of the other protagonists and sure, why not?
A content warning
A few years ago, I used a metaphor that involved PVL’s urine. Maybe it was Phil Gould’s? I cannot for the life of me find what I wrote or remember the context, other than it was likely included in an overly incendiary post about the direction of the NRL.
From time to time, a piece of feedback from the general public makes its way to my eyes. In this case, I clearly remember someone was quite aggrieved at the disgusting metaphor I had deployed, presumably not realising that disgust was the emotion I was trying to provoke in the reader.
Anyway, there are recurring themes of masturbation in this week’s newsletter. It is not my fault that there are at least two (2) reasons to refer to it. Please do not let this disgraceful writing on my part discourage you from subscribing.
Around the grounds
World Club Challenge - Hull KR 30 defeated Broncos 24.
“I’ve been reading a lot more and from that you learn a few things – cutting out bad habits. I don’t mind talking about it because it’s definitely an issue, not just for myself but throughout the world.
“I changed a few things about my diet and stopped watching porn. Honestly, if any man or woman feels like they have a problem with it, just stop for a month or two and come back to me and tell me it hasn’t made a difference. It’s definitely made a difference in my life.
“It wasn’t making me feel better so why was I doing it? I just stopped. I haven’t watched porn in about two years. It’s given me more energy.”
That’s Hull KR winger, Joe Burgess. What are you doing losing to no-fap volcels? This guy probably thinks Andrew Tate has some good points. Having said that, I wholeheartedly encourage England to make not watching porn and not jerking off heaps the strategic cornerstone of their World Cup campaign. You know, once they hire a coach. Perhaps the candidates’ policy on consumption of pornography can form part of the hiring criteria.
As noted in the Pony Picayune, the Broncos beat Hull KR by 400 metres with two minutes less ball but lost because Adam Reynolds coudn’t make three conversions and/or the Broncos let in some poor tries. There are plenty of excuses - cold, jet lag, rust, Cory Paix is anthromorphic constipation - the Broncos still lost to the most important part of the boat.
Super League round 2. Jacob Alick-Wiencke led a poor defensive showing from Leigh on the way to a narrow defeat at St Helens. York City came back to earth with a thud, crushed by Brodie Croft’s Leeds. Maika Sivo got the chants at Headingley as he physically demolished his opposite number. Odsal’s first Super League game in 12 years saw Bradford roll through a disinterested Catalan, racking up a slew of penalty goals along the way. Even getting two wins, and there’s a huge amount of season to go, is a huge result for the resurrected club. Les Dracs’ Sol Faataape pounced on a loose ball for a try and forced an error for a second by future Bear Toby Sexton. Fellow promotees Toulouse outclassed Castleford at home. Wigan were up by 18 after 20 minutes en route to a battering of Hull FC and the commentators were giving the Airlie Birds no chance of a comeback on the second half kick-off. Still want Junior Nsemba to matriculate to the NRL sooner rather than later. Huddersfield’s Sam Halsall had some great moments in an otherwise sloppy affair, as the Giants made a late comeback against Wakefield Trinity. I feel bad every time I see Tyson Smoothy.
The money is not a mirage but money is still fake
We were nearly done talking about the administration, for a while at least, so we could focus on footy. We were so close to being free but then the Controlling Body published their annual report. As is TMO annual tradition, let’s judge the degree of optical illusion around the financials.
In 2024, the Controlling Body seemingly only made money because it slashed costs, passing off work that is no longer being done as sensible economic management. This seemed like a mirage. The following year’s report saw some, but not all, funding restored while maintaining the same profitability, which seemed like not so much of a mirage. While some context makes the financial results less extraordinary, it is harder and harder to deny the financial health of the NRL.
Now, the NRL is directly funding a club in Perth, which I’ve wanted them to do for ages, and there’s still plenty of money, and plenty more coming in the next broadcast deal, so… what am I complaining about again?
The strikingly consistent way line-goes-up suggests the organisation and the accounting are run to the spreadsheet and not to purpose. Philosophically, you can take that as you will.
Line items for development and community and welfare are down, slightly. The investment properties lost half a million in reported value, down from $21.7m to $21.2m (-2.5%) with another $14 million in “investment servicing” costs. Administration costs are slightly up.
Far more importantly to people who matter, there’s a bigger net operating result and a bigger line item for revenue and a bigger line item for club and player distributions.
One of the recurring themes of this newsletter is that V’Landys and Abdo bought off the clubs with ever increasing distributions. While that is true, the rate at which the distributions are growing is slower, on a non-compounding annual basis, than under Smith or Greenberg. The club distribution line item increased 88% in four years under Smith (22% pa) and 28% in four years under Greenberg (7.2% pa), while Abdo has delivered 41% over six (6.8% pa). Some of that is covid, some of that is the timing of TV deals, some of that is the extra mouth to feed in the shape of the Dolphins and some of that is accounting but it is interesting to note.
Is the NRL any better off than we would be under Greenberg? Maybe, maybe not. Abdo and co’s primary advantage in the historical assessment is that we don’t have to speculate how they would have performed. It seems that the rugby league elite decided that they didn’t like Greenberg and worked back from that conclusion, rather than looking at the facts. Again, take that as you will.
Should the Controlling Body be making a “profit”? Probably not a significant one. On the other hand, what are they going to do with all this cash?
Should the NRL clubs be the only rugby league beneficiaries of the rivers of gold minted by Abdo and V’Landys? No. Is there a bunch of stuff that the Controlling Body could do instead of buying hotels that immediately decrease in value? Yes. Should there be more transparency and accountability around the finances? Obviously.
Does anyone care? Viewership has doubled over the last decade and change and this is the guiding principle of the administration:
The 2025 season had the highest-ever live ball-in play percentage and record breaking ball-in-play time, with fans enjoying more action per minute than any previous season.
So no, it seems not. Two simplistic market truisms stick in the mind:
The ultimate signal of the end of a bubble is when all the bears have become bulls
The market can also stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
Where’s the Polymarket for the NRL’s next TV deal? The line could be as high as $7 billion and I’m still taking the over. It is time to be bullish.
Intermission
Speaking of self-love…
My pearls! Where are my pearls?! I have no understanding of why he would make such a bizarre gesture.
Between this and Cleary’s ice in his veins, I propose a moratorium on Australians making any kind of hand gesture in the lead-up, during or immediately following the World Club Challenge. How about you try catching the ball, you pair of wankers?
Sunshine State-wide
Queensland’s four NRL clubs could field teams in the state’s Hostplus Cup competition if a new investigation finds it will boost the game.
This masthead understand the four clubs - the Broncos, the Titans, the Dolphins and the Cowboys - met earlier this month to discuss the matter.
The change could happen as soon as next season though time is running short for that to happen.
There’s no real new information and some confused reporting:
The Dolphins effectively have a footprint in the Cup as they are an off-shoot of the Redcliffe Dolphins, but if they field a designated Dolphins NRL reserve grade team their Hostplus Cup would change shape and likely become much younger and stacked with future NRL prospects.
It is understood the Cowboys and Dolphins strongly support the concept of NRL reserve grade teams in Hostplus Cup, the Titans have an open mind on the discussion while strongly preserving their links with their feeder clubs, while the Broncos are less passionate about it.
Are the Dolphins really considering ditching Redcliffe altogether? Surely they aren’t proposing to run The Dolphins and the Redcliffe Dolphins in the same comp?
The changing nature of QCup is such that my opposition to this is less than it was 12 months ago but I still think this will suck. There aren’t enough players to have a decent 18-team Queensland Cup on top of a 19-team NRL, 14-team Super League and whatever the NSWRL cooks up. There’s no reason - commercial or cultural - any of the QCup teams should have to take a step down in the hierarchy to make way for NRL reserves teams.
One of the fallacies of fielding NRL reserve grade sides in second tier competitions is they will dominate the competition.
History insists that district teams playing with the singular focus of winning the title can often be stronger than those filled with reserve grade NRL players whose career ambitions lie in the higher grade.
In 2021, Norths won the grand final with a squad of 17 players who had all been signed by the Devils that year, beating a Wynnum-Manly team in the grand final which featured Selwyn Cobbo, Jesse Arthars, TC Robati and Richie Kennar.
Well, based on that single datapoint, I’m sold.
Hotseat
To pick up where we left off last year, let’s consider the current risk levels:
🔥🔥🔥 Seibold
🔥🔥🔥 Payten
🔥🔥 Flanagan
🔥🔥 Marshall
🔥 Fitzgibbon
🔥 Ciraldo
🔥 Webster
Seibold and Payten are ordinary bad seasons away from losing their jobs, while Flanagan and Marshall are very bad seasons away from being sacked. Fitzgibbon, Ciraldo and Webster are coaches of notionally good teams that have to continue to deliver. They are not candidates for sackings this year but a poor season puts them on the block for next year. If the remaining five (Woolf, Maguire, Hannay, Holbrook and Ryles) avoid a historically bad season, they should remain intact but I guarantee that someone will blow it. Then there’s those who are never, ever going to get a fire emoji: Bellamy, Bennett, Stuart, Robinson (most marginal of these five) and Cleary.
Let’s set this year’s line at 3.5 sackings. Years where there are one or two sackings, as in 2025, are followed by years where there are at least four, so I am taking the over, although I cannot reliably say who I think the four will be, other than early bets on Payten and Seibold.
Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer
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Watch guide
Watch the games in Vegas, I guess? I haven’t seen PVL grovelling for Trump’s attendance yet but there’s still time. The Cowboys are playing the Knights, which is just a dreck way to kick off the season. Bulldogs against the Dragons is not much better. Maybe let’s see if Toulouse can go 3-for-3 against Bradford.
The watch guide will return next week.
Stats pop
I am working on some Super League stuff. There are no further updates at this time.
“Shouldn’t you be doing some NRL advanc-”
No. Further. Updates. At this time.
Actually, I may do a quasi-deep dive in a Stats Drop to come next week or the week after. Last year’s deep dive was both ugly (my fault) and didn’t deliver the kind of views to justify the time invested into making it ugly - I acknowledge that those things may be related - so have held off on it this season, hence the vibes-based analysis up front.
Read this
Steve Mascord: The epic saga of the Brisbane Broncos (somewhat undermined by their flop of a performance but we’ve covered that already)
Storm Machine: Season 28 – Review
Notes
The Roar goes silent, staff unpaid, amid ownership dispute. RIP.
International eligibility laws set for major overhaul in time for Women’s Rugby League World Cup. The IRL are looking to abolish the tiers for women’s footy to push more Origin-eligible players out of the Jillaroos and into the Kiwi Ferns (and England I guess) and then push fringe players from the Kiwi Ferns to the rest of the Pacific to even up the teams a bit. It’s nice to see an idea whose implementation might solve an actual problem.3
Jacek McLaurin: Footballer fighting for life after trial match tackle gone wrong. Best wishes to McLaurin and his family.
Cowboys star Jeremiah Nanai’s mum abandoned him as a child – then she came calling after 12 years. A bittersweet story.
Toby Rudolf comes across as a bit of a weirdo but he seems to really, really want to play for the Chieves. One wonders if the laws of PNG might conflict with certain aspects of his lifestyle but I guess he can figure that out for himself.
Can’t remember if I included this in an earlier newsletter but PVL is trying to get a TV deal done well before the end of the year. Seven’s new magazine show is being taken as a signal that they’ll be interested in NRL rights but I think it’s just a low cost investment in making the World Cup rights worthwhile. Again, I don’t see how they can manage AFL and NRL but it’s not impossible.
The NRL went hard on touting their huge increases in TV ratings in the press releases around the annual report, mostly off the back of time of ball in play. Being the “most popular sport in the Pacific” and combining Australian and New Zealand ratings to overpower the reach of the AFL is easy enough to see through but also shows how important the Pacific is to the future of the NRL, not least because it opens up government funding under the guise of extending Australian soft power.
I also noted the cumulative audience of 12.5 million for the NRLW. We didn’t have a lot of NRLW data for last year’s analysis, relegating what we did have to a footnote. Taking out the finals, 12.5m suggests each NRLW regular season game averaged 150k viewers. Given how few games actually rated, this seems likely to be the reach (how many people watched the game for a bit) and not the average (how many people watched the whole thing). There is no fixed ratio between reach and average, but it suggests the average NRLW game is somewhere in the range of 50 to 100k viewers.
I didn’t watch as much of the Winter Olympics as I would have liked, almost entirely because I refuse to pay for Stan Sports. However, and not to go all patriotic on you, but there is something special about Australia, a country that has barely any snow and effectively no mountains but can still pool the resources to put some random kids on top of the world. Team USA could never.
ARLC appoints independent decision maker for off-field matters. The scope for this seems quite limited. The independent decision make is off-field matters only, excluding doping, recreational drugs, racism, no-fault stand downs and discretion over registering players. The latter two remain the purview of the CEO, who retains the right to appeal decisions (to whom?). After all that, what is left to adjudicate?
Stray thought: remember when Code Sports launched and it was going to be The Athletic for Australia? Well, that went about as predicted. Now it’s all uncomfortable writers doing vertical video in branded polos. Just what people wanted.
For the handful of union fans that subscribe, it seems I wasn’t that crazy when I was talking about Origin in NZ last week: League’s Origin salvo a fresh attack in union battle
This week in China: The rail ahead: as high-speed lines saturate China, how far can their global reach extend? Funny that America is pouring its entire economy into AI, a technology that may have some uses but is extremely unlikely to deliver the transformations promised by the marketing copy or justify the return on investment in a commercial time scale, while China embraces the future and connects real people and faciltiates trade with trains that go fast.
Although I find this level of parity somewhat uninteresting because the individual games are devoid of informational content. The games become coin flips. For the season to have a character, there still needs to be blockbusters or big upsets every month or so, and for there to be blockbusters and upsets, you need well established teams that are winning much more often than they lose.
Worth noting that the Raiders have outperformed their Pythag by +11.1 wins over the last four seasons, which is the highest of any four year stretch in the NRL era. The next best are the 99-02 Bulldogs (+8.8). A lesser mind might think this means Ricky’s beaten the system or this run cancels out the -6 stint from 2015 to 2018. Sounder minds know that mean reversion isn’t quite as reliable as gravity but it’s pretty close.
This sets the stage for an international women’s draft to fill the January void. Players with multiple loyalties go into a big pool. Worse nations get more/better picks to improve their rosters by selecting eligible players for the year before Aus/NZ/Eng. Rosters reset each season and there’s no draft in World Cup years.
I guess you then reintroduce a tiered system for nations that participate in the draft (Samoa, Tonga, France, Fiji, PNG, Cook Is, Ireland, Wales) and those that don’t (Netherlands, Canada, etc). Nigeria? Greece? Maybe there’s a volume of picks that get issued depending on schedule (e.g. more picks if you are expected to play Australia, fewer if you are in Euro C/MEA).