The greatest bit of magic conducted during the NRL’s magic round is Peter V’landys managing to make all the good will he has earned in the last year disappear in less than three days.
That’s not to say he has been wrong. The crackdown on high tackles has been a long time coming, and can only be a good thing for the game in general. The argument has been centred more around HOW the rules were applied. I think the game needs a bit more nuance than what was displayed on the weekend, but the blunt force approach of the officials certainly got the point across - contact with the head in an attempted tackle is completely unacceptable.
The NRL is in a somewhat precarious position right now. The administration is trying to merge the brutality of the contact sport that many Australians know and love, with the reality of health management issues that are a natural side effect of these kinds of sports.
I think that there are plenty of lessons that can be learned from the NRLs bigger, more successful cousin - the NFL. Statistically, the NFL is a global juggernaut. In a poll by Statista 70% of US consumers consider themselves fans of pro football.
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That’s market domination. Australia admittedly has more irons in the fire - Rugby Union and AFL are both contact sports that have a similar demographic that they appeal to. However, the NRL isn’t doing itself any favours by diluting the product with the way the game is being officiated.
So below are the five concepts that should be borrowed (okay, stolen) from the NFL.
Scorer kicks off
Rugby is the only sport in the world where it is actually possible for one team to never touch the ball. In this great sport of ours, if you score points, you get the ball again. And again. And again. This is antithetical to the entire concept of the ball sport, where the foundation lies in ‘you go, I go’. This was never more obvious than in the recent game between the Panthers and the Titans. Moses Leota laid a high shot on Titans half Fogarty and was sent to the bin for 10 minutes. The Titans had the ball for two of those minutes.n The Panthers laid on two tries and (with a bit of officiating help) simply dominated the time of possession until Leota returned.
The game is more physically demanding than ever, and the opportunity to provide a circuit breaker to the team that just got done defending cannot be a bad thing. At the least, this provides a reset of the momentum in the game and should contribute to slowing down the blowouts that have become so common this year.
24/7/365 News Cycle
Rugby league fans are terrified of the off-season. If a player shows up in the news post October, it’s usually bad. Because the NRL is a national product, any news is good news for the media, so they trot out every poor decision a player makes for everyone to talk about. The way to prevent this is to spread out the good stuff.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, NFL players are also very adept at getting themselves in all sorts of trouble. The NFL skates past this stuff because there is always something else for the media to fixate on. The NFL season only runs for about five months, and yet it dominates headlines all year round because they have expertly positioned the various ‘outside’ parts of the game.
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For your standard NFL consumer, the season kicks off in September. The climax of the season is in February, when the Superbowl announces the winner. Literally as soon as the Superbowl finishes, the talk turns to free agency. Who is going to sign where, and for how much occupies everybody's minds through the end of March.
At which point the attention turns to the draft. After the draft, it’s time for training camp. Then pre-season. Then kick off again in September. The point here is that the NFL always has something to occupy the talking heads other than players' poor behaviour. In the NRL, if a player screws up in November, you can be sure they’ll still be talking about it in January because there isn’t anything else to talk about.
The point is the NRL shouldn’t be compressing the interesting parts of the sport.
Adam Reynolds' decision on where to play next year shouldn’t be played out at the same time as Souths are trying to win the premiership. At the very least, you are detracting from one topic for the other - the NRL is cannibalising its own media stream. Free agency in the NRL should kick off in November/December, which would definitely give the media something else to focus on, rather than what the players are doing (good or bad) in their personal lives.
The secondary benefit of this is to stop the flow of negativity to young men for making a decision on their employment. Xavier Coates is going to cop hell from Broncos fans for signing with the Storm. He isn’t the first, nor will he be the last, to receive this barrage of negativity for what is essentially a business decision. Young Coates made a good decision, he is going to a successful team, with a great coach, an excellent culture and a rich contract. If he was a plasterer, you’d think he was just doing the smart thing. In the NRL, he is going to get roasted for the next few months because of this decision.
This is all fixed if free agency is at the end of the season. By that point, everybody and his dog knows that Coates is a free agent and it’s the Broncos job to get his contract sorted before free agency kicks off on November 16th (or whatever that date ends up being in my theoretical NRL).
Fines, not suspensions
“We are in the entertainment business,” Wayne Bennett said, and he is exactly right. f you aren’t attracting eyeballs, you may as well pack up and go home. The NFL rarely, if ever, suspends players for acts of foul play on the field. In 2020, there was a grand total of two players suspended, and that was for PED usage. The last real suspension for on-field misbehaviour came when Cleveland Browns Defensive End Myles Garrett ripped off the helmet of an opposing player and then beat him bloody with it. Which, I mean, fair enough for that guy to get suspended. The list of every player to ever be suspended from the NFL can be found here, and yeah, it looks like a long list. Until you realise that the NFL suspended six guys in the entire year of 2019, and the NRL had 24 players charged at the judiciary just last weekend.
The point is that the product isn’t as good when your best players aren’t playing. If the product isn’t as good, people will stop watching. If people stop watching, broadcasters won’t pay the league to produce it… at which point you’re back playing park footy wondering why nobody wants to watch a bunch of reggies play on Friday night Football.
So the alternative is fines. Not just for the player, for the club as well. If you follow the NRL, then you know that there is only a small number of clubs that are actually making money without league supplements. That means if Joe Numbskull starts piling up fines, it’s going to affect the bottom line of your club, which means you won’t want Mr Numbskull lining up for you on the weekend, which mean there will be less Numbskulls running around, taking players heads off and chewing on the furniture. A real win/win all round.
Replacement, not dismissal
Did you know that no team in NRL history has ever won a game in which one of their players was sent off in the first half? Simply put, Rugby League is a numbers game and if you have a long term (more than 40 minutes) numerical disadvantage then you aren’t going to win.
The NFL often ejects players from games. If a player accumulates two personal fouls, or commits a particularly violent personal foul, then that player is removed from the game and the team has to replace the player on the field.
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Here’s my point, Rugby League is supposed to be 13v13. I have no interest in entertaining the idea that a 12v13 is a fair game, but I also feel it’s unfair for a player to remain on ground after egregiously fouling the opposition. The solution would be to force the team to interchange the offending player, who is then excluded from the remainder of the game. If the team has no more interchanges, then the team would indeed go down to 12 players, this would prevent teams from trying to use it tactically at the back end of games.
Sure, if you want to go one step further and propose a ‘power play’ like they do in the NHL I would support that idea as well.
Monetisation and more revenue streams
This one should be fairly self explanatory. The amount of dead screen I see on the average Kayo broadcast is stupid wasteful. Fill up that dead space! Make me want to keep watching, rather than going to get a drink or something to eat. And no, I don’t mean those terrible YouTube ads that make me want to gouge my eyes out. Advertise other sports. It really can’t be that hard to cross promote that sort of thing.
One of the deadest spaces in Rugby League is during the conversion after scoring a try. Admittedly, there are occasions when the conversion is an incredibly important part of the game. That would be more in the minority though, with most of those kicks being a formality if they are more or less directly in front. Why not split screen that with a ‘Conversion sponsor’? Everyone already has widescreen TVs, and watching a dude kick a ball through the posts is just a binary outcome (it either goes in or it doesn’t) and you can figure out which one it is by seeing if the refs flags go up or stay down.
I will say that I cribbed this idea from the NBA, because they do the split screen advertising during free throws, but I do think it applies to Rugby League as well.
So there you have it, five ideas I blatantly stole from the NFL that would be of benefit to the NRL. If you just read this and thought to yourself that I’m out of my mind with these ideas - post your own ideas.
Because the scary truth is that Rugby League is occupying a smaller and smaller commercial footprint than ever before, and the global sports aren’t going to stop expanding. They’ll chew up and spit out the NRL in the time it takes me to write this stuff, so we better be looking for every way we can to increase viewership and the attractiveness of our product. I’m open to changing my mind if the idea is good enough, and if you’re a true fan of Rugby League then you should be open to any idea that puts our sport on top.
