Bob on. I've been saying it for years. If players are getting burnt out due to too many games, reduce the number of games they can play in a season. You don't have to reduce the games (and lose money from it in the process).

Go check out the NFL business model. Eight home games a season per club.

But they're getting paid Billions

Southern Hemishere Tri Nations involving Kangaroos, Kiwis, combined PI team (every second year, as PI team would break up for RLWC qualifiers year and RLWC year). Then home and away tours against European nations (e.g. England, Wales and France). The non-test NRL players could play in a NRC style competition. Each club could still get 12 home games, but test players would only play in the 8 NRL home games.

The RFL could reduce the load on Europe's test players in the same way - reduce the SL to 20 rounds, yet let the clubs enter the NRC (minus test players) to make up the 6 rounds. SL clubs would still get 13 home games, but England could get a 10 test program.

the solution is for the nrl to stop for 3 weeks for origin.

origin would then be held for 3 straight weeks with all attention on that.

the rest of the nrl would get a break and the rep. players will have a lower workload by not having to back up for club games.

i think the nrl should be 22 rounds.

we need to have an annual 3 match test series with NZ.

one off tests dont work well for nz, they need a game or so to get warmed up unlike australia.

i may well go look at it latter, but in the mean time why not answer the questions i've asked

its just not that straight forward tho..
would the players be on 2 contracts? one for the league and one for the cup? otherwise its mighty unfair club work load for the non internationals
would there be different salary caps?
how do you stop the internationals playing in the nrc cup?
if you somehow get pass restriction of trade, what measure are you going to actually use to judge who can't play? in the train in squad, in the team squad, in the team?
what happens about the teams that have better average players, so they only loose 1/2 players, compared to the teams that loose 6/7?
are these games going to be on at the same time at the internationals?
....
there's 100's more questions, none of which give a particularity good answers
reducing a strong competition in place of a weak nrc style cup, and a couple extra internationals doesn't sound to great to myself

as said above if some(all) players are really worried about burn out, sign a limited number of games contract, don't back up after origin etc

Pretty much summed the whole thing up there really

But the answers are all there.

You may not agree with my conclusions but I'm using the NFL and it's history as an example as it's so obvious Tallis is drawing from this.

It too started as a minority sport confined in the corner of one country and too a degree RL has already implemented some of the cornerstones of it's success (obviously not everthing is the same between the two infrastructures).

What do you base your argument on that this simply cannot be made to work?

Why the need for two contracts? Could there not just be one that included international call-up clauses?
You'd stop them playing in the NRC because they'd be playing internationals. If they're not playing internationals, or not in the set-up, they would be eligible to play for their club.
Where's the restriction of trade?
The teams that have more international call-ups will be more affected, yes. But it would put more of an emphasis on squad-depth. There could be an arrangement made where clubs that have many players called-up could have certain salary cap dispensions where they are credited a certain amount of money extra onto their salary cap allowance for the use of their international players, which could then be used to pay for a bigger squad. It also wouldn't affect their SL campaign as they would be only called up during NRC games.

Just because you cannot find any good answers doesn't mean there aren't any. And if we can get more international games out of it, it does sound like a good idea. We get far more media coverage from internationals than we do usual SL rounds, and we'd finally be building up some sort of England brand rather than just a team that plays a few games at the end of the season. Anything that increases the international calendar is a good idea IMO.

That's inaccurate. The NFL itself started as a league confined to the north-east and mid-west, but the sport was already played in colleges across the US by then. The NFL season has lengthened gradually over the years, with the last change going from 14 to 16 games. They now play over 17 weeks and are investigating options to make their season longer.

That's misleading. 32 teams play 16 fixtures over 17 weeks (one is a bye week).

There are no plans to expand it to mirror an RL model or anything close to that i.e. Premier League.

There are tentative plans to expand the NFL outside the US with new teams though, such has been the success of the business model.

(And even with a big collegiate base the professional game took a long time to grow from it's corner using the more traditional models)