Sharkalytics 2024 Trial Game 1 vs Knights

[BurgoShark]

You can't deny skittling defender who then end up behind the PTB & have to get back is good. Unless you don't take advantage of it. If you leave ****s on the ground you're probably getting a decent PTB.

Only if it does lead to that quick ptb. Skittling 2 blokes and then getting swamped by another 3 and turtled onto your back while those first to get onside doesn't help the team much. Winning the tackle is all that really matters.

For my purposes I'm thinking about what we can objectively measure. If I can define "winning the tackle" that will help.

Will carry this on in the Kaufusi thread.

 

[Sparkles]

Thought Oregon played like a first grader where most were playing a trial. Good, solid showing.

 

[Capital_Shark]

Also it shows dominance.

Only if it does lead to that quick ptb. Skittling 2 blokes and then getting swamped by another 3 and turtled onto your back while those first to get onside doesn't help the team much. Winning the tackle is all that really matters.

Pretty rare the guy who leaves 2 in his wake then gets turtled. If you have a run like that the ref rarely lets it go to ground & probably gives 6 again if it does.

Your biggest variable is the ref lol

 

[BurgoShark]

Also it shows dominance.

Pretty rare the guy who leaves 2 in his wake then gets turtled. If you have a run like that the ref rarely lets it go to ground & probably gives 6 again if it does.

Your biggest variable is the ref lol

Oh for sure. I just mean that “breaking tackles” is not the indicator.

It’s the end result that is important. Get a quick ptb, or a good offload, or pass to someone in a better position. Any of these I would consider “winning the tackle ”.

If your front rower breaks 3 tackles then tries to throw a four man cutout ball give to winger instead of taking the tackle, that’s not great either (unless your front rower is Ellie Johnston).

 

[bort]

Also it shows dominance.

Pretty rare the guy who leaves 2 in his wake then gets turtled. If you have a run like that the ref rarely lets it go to ground & probably gives 6 again if it does.

Your biggest variable is the ref lol

Main time I find you actually see it is off the back fence kick returns / kick offs

Bloke sends someone flying but loses all momentum himself and ends up a slow ptb.

Not every time of course.

Works best is you mix up steps/angles
Little step the first couple times then no step third time catches them off guard.
But maybe you get subbed off before the 3rd one comes…

Worth it to do the plain looking ones so when you level someone you actually get a decent ptb to go with the highlight

 

[Capital_Shark]

Oh for sure. I just mean that “breaking tackles” is not the indicator.

It’s the end result that is important. Get a quick ptb, or a good offload, or pass to someone in a better position. Any of these I would consider “winning the tackle ”.

If your front rower breaks 3 tackles then tries to throw a four man cutout ball give to winger instead of taking the tackle, that’s not great either (unless your front rower is Ellie Johnston).

Yeah **** tackle busts & tackle breaks or whatever fantasy points they got. If your prop just run through 2 blokes drawing in another 3 to finish it off you're gonna have some momentum against at best an unorganized D line, that's if all 5 got onside. A 6 again is immanent if you play it direct (no 4 man cut outs).

I feel like a skittling BHU run inside their 20 results in points for us at a good rate.

 

[Capital_Shark]

Main time I find you actually see it is off the back fence kick returns / kick offs

Bloke sends someone flying but loses all momentum himself and ends up a slow ptb.

1st up from kick-off is almost lamb to the slaughter stuff. I see that going bye bye.

 

[bort]

1st up from kick-off is almost lamb to the slaughter stuff. I see that going bye bye.

Good fun though!

 

[BurgoShark]

1st up from kick-off is almost lamb to the slaughter stuff. I see that going bye bye.

Takes a special kind of mind to take that run.

 

[Sevshark]

Jokes aside @Capital_Shark, oomph doesn’t trump involvement. It compliments it.

If Kaufusi is doing the same amount of work while bending the line and getting quick ptb’s more often, that’s awesome. More oomph from that guy compared to last year would be great - even if we can’t measure it.

And…

If you give me two similarly involved players and one runs with more oomph, I’d prefer the extra oomph guy.

But…

If you offere me Tolman or Pele, I’m taking Tolman every time.

Oomph only adds value if your involvement level is up to NRL standard. Involvement is the baseline.

Stop trying to flirt with me

 

[BurgoShark]

So say we wanted to create a model for “winning the tackle”…

I would think the biggest thing to determine is weighting on how many men are in the tackle. I.e. it is harder to find your front when three blokes are holding you than one or two.

Would be interested in other peoples’ thoughts on how they think this could work.

 

[BurgoShark]

Stop trying to flirt with me

You don’t mean that.

 

[Proud Shark]

So say we wanted to create a model for “winning the tackle”…

I would think the biggest thing to determine is weighting on how many men are in the tackle. I.e. it is harder to find your front when three blokes are holding you than one or two.

Would be interested in other peoples’ thoughts on how they think this could work.

I think you'd want to determine a range of what a good ptb speed is overall. Then see if each are in the fast, average or slow range.

 

[BurgoShark]

I think you'd want to determine a range of what a good ptb speed is overall. Then see if each are in the fast, average or slow range.

I don’t think you can do that as a model. You can’t compare ptb speed for a 4 man tackle vs 1 man tackle v surrender etc.

What I mean is, if a guy has 9 runs, and 3 of each are 1, 2 and 3 man tackles, to what degree should we say that winning a 3 man tackle is worth more? The best middles are the players who can win the tackle regularly when tackled by 3+.

E.g.

15% of score is 1 man tackles
30% 2 man
55% 3+ man

or whatever

 

[bort]

At first I thought that split made sense but if a player can consistently get into a position they are 1v1 score/offload/quick ptb that’s pretty good too

How will you determine winning tackle from ptb perspective? Markers not set?

 

[BurgoShark]

At first I thought that split made sense but if a player can consistently get into a position they are 1v1 score/offload/quick ptb that’s pretty good too

NRL teams keep stats on this. It’s a measure of whether the ball players are doing their job.

I.e. it’s not the forward’s job to get himself one on one consistently. Hookers and halves train for it. Any decent ball-playing lock would too.

… so counting the number of player in tackles gives us both an idea of the conditions a player is taking his runs under, and whether the playmaking group is doing an effective job of creating 1-on-1’s.

It’s yet another reason why I bang my head on the wall when you see a game where three different forwards make line breaks after beating a guy one on one and then the forum goes “Brailey didn’t do anything in attack”. (Isolating a defender one on one doesn’t get a LBA stat).

For this discussion, we are trying to assess “run quality”. You can’t compare two blokes who took their runs under completely different conditions, so I need an objective and measurable way to do this.

It’s a similar principle to run location. Some guy taking a bunch of runs inside the attacking end and getting quick ptb’s is great, but the bloke who took a few runs in the attacking end while also tracking back inside his own 20 to do some harder carries is providing a different type of value - so it’s not fair to compare these two guys using “runs” or “metres”.

It’s easy to just present all three numbers, but if I want to boil it down to one number to map “oomph vs involvement” graph I need to consolidate the three raw percentages in to one score… which I will then baseline like I have for attack and defence (what is a normal tackle-winning score for a competent bench middle?).

How will you determine winning tackle from ptb perspective? Markers not set?

I won’t. Too subjective.

I’m talking only about whether the runner is able to find his front quickly and then play the ball cleanly.

 

[Sparkles]

So say we wanted to create a model for “winning the tackle”…

I would think the biggest thing to determine is weighting on how many men are in the tackle. I.e. it is harder to find your front when three blokes are holding you than one or two.

Would be interested in other peoples’ thoughts on how they think this could work.

Just a couple of quick thoughts:
Would the number of tacklers eventually flatten? I'm not sure it'll end up adding value.
Your likely have to treat different types of runs differently. A fullbacks ptb speed would be mostly based on kick returns for example.
Is winning the tackle just as determined by the play following it? Winning might include getting to your front in the right field position, etc.

Just some hot takes from the train

 

[BurgoShark]

Just a couple of quick thoughts:
Would the number of tacklers eventually flatten? I'm not sure it'll end up adding value.
Your likely have to treat different types of runs differently. A fullbacks ptb speed would be mostly based on kick returns for example.
Is winning the tackle just as determined by the play following it? Winning might include getting to your front in the right field position, etc.

Just some hot takes from the train

Thanks mate. I'm only talking about forwards here, though there may be some value to extending to outside backs on yardage carries.

I would exclude any time the ref calls surrender, situations where a player is just collecting a loose ball and being swamped, or any situation where the clock got stopped (like Kaufusi's opening kick return) because the player didn't get an opportunity to win the tackle.

I don't think it would necessarily flatten, but I think we'd need a larger sample size than one game for it to be meaningful. Using Kaufusi as out example, he only took 8 runs in the game. At that sample size one tackle either way could make a massive difference in how it looks from a percentage PoV.

The number of players in a tackle is a team stat rather than an individual one, because the number of players in this tackle is related to what happened in the last tackle. There is a lot about the situation that a middle can't control, but they can fight to get to their front.

 

[BurgoShark]

OK - so I just re-watched all of the forward runs from the weekend (wasn't much work because they had hardly any ball).

If we look at the % of time a player won the tackle we get this...



This doesn't account for situation though.

Say a "baseline" stint looks like this..
- 4 runs into 2 man tackles (win 3, lose 1)
- 4 runs into 3+ man tackles (win 2, lose 2)

A model should reflect that a player's rating goes up if more than 50% of his runs were into 3-man tackles, and down if more than 50% of his runs were 1 or 2 man tackles.

If we run these same numbers accounting for that, we get something like this...

Our baseline player discussed above would score 62.5% here, and the team average was ~67%.


If we then convert that number into something that scales nicely against the involvement model (baseline score = 165) we can get the closest thing we've seen yet to "involvement vs oopmh".

Keep in mind that in a trial game we are not accounting for opposition quality here. Kaufusi and Hazelton were running at the Saifiti twins while some of those young players were running at 19yo kids. The purpose of working through this in a trial is to refine the model. Not to point out who was playing better.



If we wanted to incorporate this into the greater model, we could look adjusting attacking scores based on how well they performed against the team average (62.5%).

- Slight fall for Kaufusi and Hazelton
- Big jumps for the 4 guys who won the ruck at a high rate
- Big drops for a couple of the young guys

Et viola .. we now have an attacking comparison graph which incorporates run location, errors, offloads, and ruck wins. A player who consistently wins the ruck is much more valuable than just what his metres or runs stats can reflect.

 

[MMsharks]

I love all these analytics
bravo!