Am really surprised nobody has mentioned Gary Wheeler. One of the oddest signings ever for me.

Some rules of thumb for avoiding bad signings:

1. Be wary of signing players who have been somewhere where they won trophies, but are now being moved on by that club. They are being moved on because they aren't at the top level any more and if they think they are taking a step down their appetite for the game might not be the same.
2. Don't sign someone just because they are available. Particularly don't sign someone if fitting them in the starting 13 involves shifting other players out of position.
3. Be very careful not to get ripped off when you're desperate to fill a position and agents/other clubs know they can hold you to ransom.
4. When you re-sign former players, they rarely do as well for you second time around.

Point 1 was a characteristic of the Cullen era. I also think within the top teams there are a handful of core players that make that team win trophies and then the rest of them are good but not great players, who are more or less on par with a lot of players in SL. In the Cullen era we made one signing from that core of top players (Morley) but then a lot of ex Bradford, Saints players who were in the second category. It's also why I'd feel better if we had signed Sinfield or Peacock rather than Bailey.

For point 2 see Steve Blakeley and Kevin Walters. Both immediately created the issue of how to fit Briers somewhere else than 6, so by signing them we had a problem we hadn't had before. Signing players should solve problems not create them.

For point 3 see Michael Sullivan. The world knew we were chasing Matt Orford and that didn't come off. We then had Michael Monaghan as back up but that didn't come off either (he came 2 years later). We ended up signing basically a bench impact player as our big gun hope for 2006.

Point 4 was another characteristic of the Cullen era, eg Kohe-Love, Sibbit, Gleeson and Stevens.

Excellent post and Rauhihi and Asotasi seem to tick at least a couple of your boxes!

I think we were unlucky with Rauhihi because he hadn't shown signs of decline in the NRL: when we signed him he was up there with Morley as one of the dominant props. But he was a player in decline when he came to us.

Asotasi though, I had a bad feeling about this signing from the start, because reading the reaction in Australia the general verdict was "great servant but it's time to move him on", they had already noted his decline.

On the whole Rauhihi was better for us than Asotasi, with Rauhihi he had a very disappointing first season when he had one great game and was anonymous the rest of the time, his later years with us I thought he did a decent job. Maybe not the dominant force we expected but he was good enough to hold his own as a SL front rower.

I wonder where rugby league is in terms of sports analytics and using stats to get an edge by spotting early which players are in decline and who is undervalued in the market. This is a big part of US sports starting with the Moneyball stuff in baseball and is in NFL etc. It's starting to come in to football more but is still a bit hit and miss. I remember reading about Damien Comolli at Liverpool and wanting to offload Torres in that transfer window because he used to look at the number of times players reached a certain number of metres per second in their runs and he saw Torres had dropped alarmingly in the first half of the season and was convinced that he had lost his edge but people were just thinking he was out of form - so he made sure Liverpool cashed in. Also Sam Allardyce couldn't believe his luck at getting Gary Speed at Bolton, because people assumed because of his age he was past it but when Allardyce looked at various stats, Speed was on par with Gerrard and Lampard.

We've seen in RL how sometimes players drop off suddenly. Brent Grose was a classic case for us, very good player in 2003 and 2004, best fullback in SL in 2005, then he just faded inexplicably.

Two very good posts sally cinnamon especially point 3 by not showing your hand then being held to ransom, it could be said that the club allowed itself to fall into such a position with regards to recruiting half backs, Briers finished suddenly had we a half back in place ready for Briers eventual departure the club may have been in a better bargaining position over the past two seasons.

Mike Sullivan is the classic example to your point having lots of pace and more suited to playing nine, not half back, if your going to get it, get it right.

Andrew Johns 2005. He had a really good game for us against Leeds but went missing against Hull in the playoffs. We got rid of him after only 3 games and he disappeared back to Oz never to be heard of again.