champions are decided by winning the grand final.......hth

He has completely gone against his own arguement.
Fev have dominated the CC and in most other sports they would be promoted, perhaps their time will come ??
BTW, are things settling down for you at Odsal and do you think that you will be competetive next season ?

So you suggest promote the ' team ' , not the club , and the main criteria for that team is winning a one off game? , sounds like yearly promotion to me

Nice one !
You will be waiting for a long, long time to find a more dominant team than Fev in the CC.
A club winning a play off series (3 or 4 games at the end of the season, should be regarded as lucky, not dominant.
A club that finishes top of the pile 3 years on the bounce IS dominant.

Why is a club which won the qualifying comp better than the club which won the actual comp?

Yes, in this scenario Fev certainly are the strongest team in the Championship.
Top of the league 3 times on the bounce, plus one GF win and 1 runners up is still dominant.
Although the current system involving a short play off series decides the seasons champions,
finishing top of the pile is the only measure of the strongest team in any particular season.

Although we havent had a team winning the GF fro 8th, if this were to happen, you would most likely have
a club that had lost as many games as it had won regarded as to "strongest" team ?
Even Leeds finishing 5th in SL calls the playy off system into question but, WTH each to their own.

You are getting ' club ' , mixed up with ' team '

I think you are being pedantic, but hey ho.
I'm sure that a man of your stature could easily understand the point I was trying to make.
With the title of the thread, it brings the issue into clearer focus. Should we consider promoting a team that finished 4th in the league,
but won the GF ?

He's not. They are quite different. The first team is a big part of a club, but far from the entirety. It's important to understand that, particularly when thinking of franchising and P&R, where the intent is to decide P&R based on the club not the team.

It doesn’t call anything in to question. If there wasn’t the possibility of someone who didn’t win the qualifying comp, winning the entire comp, we wouldn’t bother with having the play-offs. If Fev were the best team, they would have won the competition.

I know under the rules, the Champions are the the team that win the play offs not the league leaders (unless you're in Champ 1 when it varies from week to week).

I think the debate here is whether people agree with that.

Luckily for me, my team did both this year, but I am a lot more proud of us finishing 1st in the table than winning the play offs

Congratulations !
If you win both, there can be no arguement