Officially Unofficial Burgo's Fancy Stats

[Shortfin Mako]

Tremendously

But all NRL linked teams (and down the chain) are pretty used to it.

I guess you just hope the guys coming in are good enough to make the disruption worth it

Thanks for the expalanation @bort

 

[burgess1978]

We always talk about the importance of the team playing together. Doesn’t this disrupt the cup team?

Tremendously

But all NRL linked teams (and down the chain) are pretty used to it.

I guess you just hope the guys coming in are good enough to make the disruption worth it

Yep.

This is (in my opinion) something that makes the Qld Cup a more interesting competition to follow. These QRL forbids NRL teams from loading up one feeder with all of their players so you can't have scenarios like...

- the Jets this year (8+ Sharks players subbed in on gameday)
- the start of 2019 (Sharks have injury crisis so Jets are playing almost an entire park footy team)
- the end of 2019 (Sharks scraped into the finals and then a bunch of Sharks players joined the team for the finals)

In the Qld Cup, the teams who put together a solid season and have good internal depth are generally the best teams at the back end of the year. This is not what happens in the NSW Cup.

For comparison... in 2019 when the Jets won they had 13 Sharks-contracted players in their grand final line-up and so did Wenty. Burleigh won the Qld Cup the same day with one Titans player: Anthony Don. Their opposition that day had one Broncos player: Keenan Palasia (who hadn't yet played an NRL game). This is not to say the Qld Cup teams were worse. Both had lots of former and future NRL players as part of their full-time squad.

Every now and then a June 30 switch makes a big difference to a Qld Cup team (e.g. when Fogerty and Gamble came home) but we never see the huge swings like the NSW Cup where the team from round 10 looks nothing like the team from the finals.

In general the NSW Cup has "more good players" but also a lot more chopping and changing. I reckon the Q Cup is better to watch because the teams are more consistently the same blokes week-to-week.

 

[Western Sharkie]

Soooo, with COVID over the last few years, are the Jets still reigning Premiers?

 

[burgess1978]

Soooo, with COVID over the last few years, are the Jets still reigning Premiers?

I think so.

 

[burgess1978]

Fancy stats for Round 5 versus Tigers, plus some running totals/averages for the season.

Round 5 Middle Forwards
Williams justifies his selection with a performance right in his sweet spot. 34 minutes of high involvement, split between three separate stints (12 minutes, 12 minutes, 10 minutes).



Involvement vs Minutes
Running Total for All Forwards (Rounds 1-5).



Attack vs Defence
Running Total for middle forwards only (Rounds 1-5).



Standout Performances
Top 5 games for attacking output, defensive involvement, and combined output.

Attack.



Defence



Combined




Running Total for Cameron McInnes
A game much of the time on the edge dropped his defensive involvement slightly, but his attacking output was just as good.

 

[Chad]

Hey Burgo, love all these stats and graphs, thanks for doing them.

Serious question though, would the coaching staff be doing something similar themselves?

And if so, how would they present it?

 

[burgess1978]

... and here are those top 5 individual games mapped in a quadrant for comparison against the totals.

This shows how hard it is for someone to get to (and stay in) the top right corner.


Top 5 games



Totals (same graph as previous post)

 

[burgess1978]

Hey Burgo, love all these stats and graphs, thanks for doing them.

Serious question though, would the coaching staff be doing something similar themselves?

And if so, how would they present it?

The league pays a company to collect and present this info in to certain formats. The club may then have their own people doing stuff too.

The QRL and NSWRL used to make some of the reports public. Here is a report from a Jets game in 2019. It has way more than we can get for NRL games, and this is just a summary which they generate automatically for each match. The clubs would get way more.

https://www.nswrl.com.au/siteassets/competitions/canterbury-cup/2019/stats-amazing/rd-23/newtown-jets-v-western-suburbs-magpies.pdf

 

[Chad]

The league pays a company to collect and present this info in to certain formats. The club may then have their own people doing stuff too.

The QRL and NSWRL used to make some of the reports public. Here is a report from a Jets game in 2019. It has way more than we can get for NRL games, and this is just a summary which they generate automatically for each match. The clubs would get way more.

https://www.nswrl.com.au/siteassets/competitions/canterbury-cup/2019/stats-amazing/rd-23/newtown-jets-v-western-suburbs-magpies.pdf

Thanks Burgo, plenty of detail. Good to see who is now in NRL but was playing for Jets back then.

 

[bort]

Hey Burgo, love all these stats and graphs, thanks for doing them.

Serious question though, would the coaching staff be doing something similar themselves?

And if so, how would they present it?

In my experience (which is limited) I would say it would rare that a coach would deep dive into quite the detail of, for example, comparing adjusted workloads for middle forwards regularly.

He may specifically ask sports science team for some info in that area if he is looking for something in particular, or it's possible a club could have a stats keen assistant who may dig a bit deeper off their own back and bring surprise findings to the coach.

Coach wouldn't make selection decisions based off a graph like this so he wouldn't typically look at it. While it is interesting and informative in some facets (and I am interested in it) it has no account for so many things - errors, missed tackles, 1% efforts, support runs etc

The coach 'knows' how much work these guys are doing and how many minutes they can feasibly do at various outputs.

Coach would be more interested in things like:
Last few weeks 50% of our errors came between 50-70 minute mark, is there something to address there?
Old mate gun second rower on the opposition made 38 tackles last week and missed three. But he made 30-0 on his inside shoulder and 8-3 on his outside shoulder, recent weeks similar pattern, do we want to adjust our attack lines to put players on his outside shoulder?
Opposition next week concedes twice as many meters from scrum plus two tries when run to the right compared to run to the left.
Our middle gives up slower play the balls and more missed tackles in this block of time, maybe I need to make an interchange slightly earlier than I have been etc

Usually it'd be either the coach noticing something in video review and asking sports science to dig into it, or sports science noticing something during their work and bringing it to coach.
One thing I looked at was if there was a channel on the park that most tackles were being missed by opposition and then to dive into if there was a pattern to those, and it showed a good player was struggling in specific circumstances (I think it may have been repeat efforts but I forget)

I guess I'd say the data affects other coaching choices than how he views his own players per say

 

[burgess1978]

In my experience (which is limited) I would say it would rare that a coach would deep dive into quite the detail of, for example, comparing adjusted workloads for middle forwards regularly.

He may specifically ask sports science team for some info in that area if he is looking for something in particular, or it's possible a club could have a stats keen assistant who may dig a bit deeper off their own back and bring surprise findings to the coach.

Coach wouldn't make selection decisions based off a graph like this so he wouldn't typically look at it. While it is interesting and informative in some facets (and I am interested in it) it has no account for so many things - errors, missed tackles, 1% efforts, support runs etc

The coach 'knows' how much work these guys are doing and how many minutes they can feasibly do at various outputs.

Coach would be more interested in things like:
Last few weeks 50% of our errors came between 50-70 minute mark, is there something to address there?
Old mate gun second rower on the opposition made 38 tackles last week and missed three. But he made 30-0 on his inside shoulder and 8-3 on his outside shoulder, recent weeks similar pattern, do we want to adjust our attack lines to put players on his outside shoulder?
Opposition next week concedes twice as many meters from scrum plus two tries when run to the right compared to run to the left.
Our middle gives up slower play the balls and more missed tackles in this block of time, maybe I need to make an interchange slightly earlier than I have been etc

Usually it'd be either the coach noticing something in video review and asking sports science to dig into it, or sports science noticing something during their work and bringing it to coach.
One thing I looked at was if there was a channel on the park that most tackles were being missed by opposition and then to dive into if there was a pattern to those, and it showed a good player was struggling in specific circumstances (I think it may have been repeat efforts but I forget)

I guess I'd say the data affects other coaching choices than how he views his own players per say

Yeah agreed.

I'm certainly not arguing at all that the stuff in this thread would have any value to a coach. I just think it has more value to us fans than looking at "metres" or "average metres per game", and that is something which gets raised on here fairly often when comparing/evaluating players. "Metres" by any format is not a silver bullet for comparing forwards given the other 50 things they need to do well during a game that don't show up on a stat sheet.

I guess a coach could take some generic game-plan stuff out of it, but they don't need a graph for that (e.g. Wilton took way more runs than Nikora against the Eels. Is that because something the Eels are doing - like always kicking to our left winger - or do we need to adjust something on our side of things to bring Nikora in to the game?).

 

[sharks2010]

In my experience (which is limited) I would say it would rare that a coach would deep dive into quite the detail of, for example, comparing adjusted workloads for middle forwards regularly.

He may specifically ask sports science team for some info in that area if he is looking for something in particular, or it's possible a club could have a stats keen assistant who may dig a bit deeper off their own back and bring surprise findings to the coach.

Coach wouldn't make selection decisions based off a graph like this so he wouldn't typically look at it. While it is interesting and informative in some facets (and I am interested in it) it has no account for so many things - errors, missed tackles, 1% efforts, support runs etc

The coach 'knows' how much work these guys are doing and how many minutes they can feasibly do at various outputs.

Coach would be more interested in things like:
Last few weeks 50% of our errors came between 50-70 minute mark, is there something to address there?
Old mate gun second rower on the opposition made 38 tackles last week and missed three. But he made 30-0 on his inside shoulder and 8-3 on his outside shoulder, recent weeks similar pattern, do we want to adjust our attack lines to put players on his outside shoulder?
Opposition next week concedes twice as many meters from scrum plus two tries when run to the right compared to run to the left.
Our middle gives up slower play the balls and more missed tackles in this block of time, maybe I need to make an interchange slightly earlier than I have been etc

Usually it'd be either the coach noticing something in video review and asking sports science to dig into it, or sports science noticing something during their work and bringing it to coach.
One thing I looked at was if there was a channel on the park that most tackles were being missed by opposition and then to dive into if there was a pattern to those, and it showed a good player was struggling in specific circumstances (I think it may have been repeat efforts but I forget)

I guess I'd say the data affects other coaching choices than how he views his own players per say

Sharks coaching staff just read this thread

Burg has done himself out of a job

 

[bort]

Sharks coaching staff just read this thread

Burg has done himself out of a job

I’m in with a shout now

 

[burgess1978]

Have been a bit slack with these since my own team started.

Here's the Raiders game.



... and here is the progress for McInnes.

 

[burgess1978]

More fancy stats for McInnes while playing in the middle.

Green line is individual games. Blue line is season average. I have excluded the games where he predominantly played on the edge.

Solid vertical line = 40 minutes
Dotted vertical line = 60 minutes.

You can see a trend here. Ideal deployment is 45-55 minutes. He can play for longer, but as his minutes ramped up in Rd8 his involvement dropped. Fitz has adjusted his minutes down in each the last three games and round 11 was pretty much his best output of the season (the highest output for the longest).

I can do these for any player - but it's time consuming so I won't do it for all of them. If anyone has someone else they'd specifically like me to do this for please let me know.

 

[Chad]

Thanks Burgo.

With McInnes I did think he came to us as an 80 minute player.

Is this correct?

And if he is an 80 minute player, is he still building up to this from his ACL recovery?

 

[MrDravid]

Thanks Burgo.

With McInnes I did think he came to us as an 80 minute player.

Is this correct?

And if he is an 80 minute player, is he still building up to this from his ACL recovery?

I think McInnes would have been more effective in last year's NRL - the watering down of the 6 again means he is a little less valuable (IMO). From memory he did play 80 mins most games in 2020.

I think most players are better in their 2nd year back from ACLs.

 

[bort]

Thanks Burgo.

With McInnes I did think he came to us as an 80 minute player.

Is this correct?

And if he is an 80 minute player, is he still building up to this from his ACL recovery?

He was an 80 minute hooker. As a lock he did often play 80s as well I think but was largely a tackle-bot. He did do some good runs but he didn't generally take many. I haven't confirmed this, just my feel/memory, but I think we are using him as a runner a lot more.

 

[Sparkles]

I don't think I want McInness as an 80 minute player. We have the bench to give him a break and he shouldn't be the guy who's an 80 minute battering ram week in week out. I just don't think he'll last in that role and we need him every week.

 

[burgess1978]

He was an 80 minute hooker. As a lock he did often play 80s as well I think but was largely a tackle-bot. He did do some good runs but he didn't generally take many. I haven't confirmed this, just my feel/memory, but I think we are using him as a runner a lot more.

This is accurate.