Wigan Warriors - wiganrugbyfans.com • 2019 Season - Super 8's scrapped
DaveO wrote:
I prefer that. I do not think the playoff system has delivered on the promise of improving standards by way of a more intense competition. Sure the actual playoff games themselves are intense but there are only three of those. The rest of the season is treated as a precursor to the playoffs and you can get into them losing 13 games (as happened last season). The playoffs reward mediocrity and in my view the standard has gone down not up since we changed system. Contrast that to football in the Premier League where you would be thought of as insane if you suggested a team having lost about 3 times as many games during the regular season as the team at the top should be given another chance to win it. No one seems worried that by about half way the title race is down to about six teams and as the season goes on fewer and fewer teams can win it. Instead of being concerned some team who has lost a shed load of games is out of the running and devising ways to prevent teams who dominate like Man City did last season doing so, City get praised for their football and it's accepted everyone else has to work out ways to stop them next season. In RL many seem to have convinced themselves a team winning it after a poor season demonstrates something positive when in reality all it is is a fluke and gives the impression of a stronger competition when there really isn't one.
The only issue for me with playoffs to decide who the champions are is that with an even fixture list as we have (one extra fixture at Magic Weekend doesn't affect the table greatly enough) they are unnecessary as with every club under the same fixture schedule the team at the top is clearly the best and should be champions. If you have a league where everyone doesn't play everyone else the same number of times, such as they have in the NRL or as we did have when teams played everyone twice plus 5 teams a third time then you need to use playoffs to redress the balance as an easier or harder set of "extra" fixtures can affect where teams finish on the ladder. So with our current even fixture list system then top of the table should be the champions (though we all know the cash cow that is the GF is here to stay). With the end of the 8s in sight then we could perhaps see a return of the old 27 fixture format (with teams playing 5 teams a 3rd time) this would more justifiably need a playoff structure.
However the same issue with uneven fixture lists affects the foot of the table too so if we have playoffs between the top 4 to decide the title then we should also have playoffs at the bottom to decide who goes down (9th v 12th and 10th v 11th, the winners stay up, losing teams then play each other with loser of that game going down). A ridiculous situation I know and I am not seriously suggesting it.
IMHO you do not need playoffs to decide the champions without a truly uneven fixture list that causes disparity in difficulty of fixtures, but you cannot have such an uneven fixture schedule in a league with relegation (unless you have a ridiculous relegation playoff too). If having P&R, as we are going to, then the fixtures should be the same for all so as not to potentially affect the finishing positions of clubs that could then finish bottom and be relegated due to varying difficulty of fixtures from club to club. So we would then not need to have playoffs to decide who the champions are as there would be no imbalance in fixtures to redress. However there is no chance that the GF will be scrapped despite how unnecessary it is as a method of determining the destiny of the championship.
Statistics: Posted by wiganermike — Thu Jun 14, 2018 10:08 pm — Replies 43 — Views 3124