As I said earlier in the piece, I'm not getting hung up on the number of STs we sell, the overall attendance figure is the important one to me.

If there are positive vibes about the club, which is essentially a squad which looks as though it can hold its own and no bad news before the season starts.....then I think, given fair results, we can gradually build on the ST sales with some decent roll-up figures. As always, there too many things we don't know, too many things we think we know, but don't and probably too many things we don't even know we don't know.

1st game of the season at home to say Keighley, could see a reasonable size (for this league) crowd.
An opening win could kindle interest if we have free kids tickets - and that's what we need.
Most of us probably started watching as young kids - and once the bug bites - you're a Bulls fan for life.
I keep wanting to say the only way is up, but I'm not that confident yet

On the bright side. Should we play Keighley early doors, in theory we will have a better side, more experience and a proper pre-season compared to the 25-24 loss in this seasons friendly!!

O.K. If you think the fixture next year could be strange have a look at the way the NFL work out their fixturesTHE ANATOMY OF THE NFL SCHEDULE

Each NFL team plays 16 games over the 17-week season. The league uses a formula to determine all 256 matchups.
The league’s 32 teams are split into two conferences — the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). The 16 teams in each conference are split into the East, North, South and West divisions; every division has four teams.

Here’s how each team’s opponents are set[/i

simples.

The advantage of such a conference system over here, if you could accept not playing everyone home and away every year, would be the ability to add expansion teams or remove/punish failing teams without completely ruining the structure for the rest of the competition. You can also weight the fixture list so the weaker/new teams play each other more than the likes of Leeds, cas and wigan, hopefully avoiding too many blow outs.

Problem is its a much more even competition in the NFL across all teams than UK rl, and I'm not sure I'd trust the rfl with the required fixture algorithm.

There's the key factor that we don't have over here - stability. Can anyone seriously imagine that the RFL could let the structure of the leagues to stay the same for even two years, let alone four???

I'd like to see how their structure would cope with Promotion and relegation when they say "every four years you'll play team A etc.."- then we'd see how it's done!

I suppose the beauty of their system is that there is no promotion or relegation just 32 teams run by super rich owners. In a way it's not unlike the way we are going. Most people will admit that you can't run a profitable SL team that wins things without a rich owner.

They also have a player draft. That always amazes me.

Well, yeah they do, but they have thousands upon thousands of college students (often 'studying' sport..) who are so keen to play professional football that they'll offer themselves to anyone, anywhere, just to get a foothold into the game. Their college grounds are enormous and of high quality AND attract massive crowds to games. Soccer in this country couldn't even dream of that so, for RL, it's like something happening on another planet - no another galaxy!

Yep, take this season, coming out of college Myles Garrett was almost universally reagarded as the best player in the draft class, and would find a starting spot on pretty much any NFL team, so he was drafted number 1 by the worst team last season the Cleveland Browns. He has no chance of winning anything with the Browns, buts he's happy to go and be a franchise star in Cleveland (at least at the start of his career) - he'll probably get a big move a winning team in a few years if the Browns carry on not competing, and to be fair he is getting a $30m wage and a $20m signing on bonus over 4 years...

But that draft culture is so different, and works really well (mostly) for the NFL in levelling up the competition. But it helps when the weakest team in the league can spend $50m on one player! not really any fair comparison to RL!

It is a fair comparison though.

The NFL in anything like its present form only dates back to maybe 1922. The wisdom and actions of administrators between then and now have made it what it is.

You may say we're not the USA, and OK we're not, but if our game was even 1/10th the size of theirs, we'd be minted compared with the present penury.

You may say we don't have enough population or #whatever other excuse you want to swallow, but then just look across the globe at the NRL - Aus has much less population and of that, the main NRL areas are narrow yet they have also learned how to make a reasonably big busines out of their sport.

The blunt answer is that over here, the RFL have been rubbish at their job, and the game is on the bones of its arrrse, for which there is no excuse. Even in places like Canada, there are visionaries who can see the potential in the game, and are willing to throw money at it and actively go for it. We're sadly stuck with this lot. If you transplanted the administrators of the RFL into the NFL, how do we all think that would have gone?

I meant not fair in terms of the money and players available to the weaker end of the comps.

But you're right in that vision and leadership, and most crucially, following through on the vision has helped the NFL become what it is. We've had plenty of ideas and attempts at stuff in rl, but rarely have we really followed through with a long term strategy. At least that's how it seems.

We still don't even know basic stuff about 2018, like how many teams will be Competing in league 1? so we don't know how many home games we'll have. I presume the club must be running with the working assumption it will be the same as this year, but who's really confident in that?
That doesn't just compare badly with the NFL, that shambles compares badly with almost any organised sport across the world. How can any club in league 1 plan for 2018 correctly? Nevermind a club with no excisting squad in place. I'm surprised the club made any commitment on season ticket prices or numbers at this stage until we know the number of home games.

Well maybe Cha-Lo is making it up as they go along too? It seems so. They weren't even sure how much central distribution they were getting last week (£75k not £150k).

They don't think they've a case to answer with these current and former players and staff but can't know for sure.

They've no idea what discussions have been held between the RFL and BMDC over Odsal.

They don't know who the head coach is.

They don't have any idea what our fixtures will look like next season.