Sorry, I haven't been on here since I posted so haven't answered the questions raised. I won't answer every one individually but I'll answer this one and hopefully it will make clear the points I'm making.

First of all, the 'every game counts' was not referring to the winners alone. The playoffs are still in existence so everyone is still playing for a playoff place. The difference being that it would remove the farce that we currently have where the league is nothing more than an extended pre-season to a cup competition! the ONLY way to stop this ridiculous situation is to have the championship won by the team finishing with the highest number of points. It works fine in Football and did for over a hundred years in our sport. I can't see anything but a devalueing of the season and, by default, the game by changing this in the manner we have. For me (and an increasing number of supporters) it's making our game a farce. If you are happy with the situation as it stands, then that's fine. That's your right. However, I find it interesting that the people who are happy with the situation are, in the main, the supporters of the team who have won it twice after finishing fifth. No coincidence I would wager. You'll never make 'every game count' in an absolute sense. You can, however, make the season more than an 8-month training run! I know which I prefer.

Why would anyone care about being named Premiers? Are you being serious? That's like saying why would anyone care about being named Challenge Cup winners? It's a title, a trophy, a big event final at a major sporting venue and an automatic entry into the WCC....not to mention a lucrative money spinner on both counts! I can't believe you actually put this forward, but hey! you're entitled to your opinion as I said earlier!

I haven't swapped round minor premiers and premiers. I have given due credit to a competion that is currently regarded as second rate when it should be the most important! But let's, for the sake of argument say I have 'just swapped them around'. What is your argument against that? I would say that is the correct way they should be regarded and anything else is merely a falsehood. There is no way on earth that the playoffs should be regarded as the 'ultimate' achievement in the sport as it currently is. The situation is laughed at by fans of other sports (I visit many football strongholds in the course of my work and, without exception, they find the way our competition is run a joke) and, if I was being honest, I find it a joke too. Winning the title (i.e finishing first) is universally regarded as the toughest achievement in the sport. It should be recognised as such. In fact, I object to the term 'minor premiers'. As for awarding the plate to mark the achievement; well, the often used nickname 'The Hubcap' tells you all you need to know.

Someone else mentioned I was putting a lot of emphasis on the WCC. I wasn't. The emphasis was on recognising that the team finishing first should be champions. As champions you would play in the WCC. QED. I'm sick of hearing that the season no longer matters. Take a look at the season ticket thread on this very site for a taste of where we are as a sport.

Bury your head in the sand all you want. I'm a season ticket holder and have been for decades. If supportors such as myself are questioning the validity of our competition (and have been for some time) I think it's fair to say that something is badly wrong with it. I can honestly say I wish it was just me who was disillusioned. The truth is it isn't. Not by a long way.

You could equally ask why does any body care about rounds 1-27 when the title is decided by a handful of matches at the end of the season.

Whatever system you adopt they both rely on the clubs taking the "meaningless" games seriously otherwise there is no point the fans turning up.

Given premiership soccer uses a league structure to decide the champions why does anyone care about the majority of games in that competition? They clearly do.

Of course the irony is, is last seasons soccer premiership being decided by virtually the last kick of the season completely rubbishes the idea you have to have a play off system to deliver an exciting end to the season.

For me the playoffs are exactly like every school kid getting a prize on sports day. It is a system that is manufactured to give the impression teams are successful because they get into a top 8 when in fact the ones at the bottom end really are just poor teams. It's like the sport is afraid to acknowledge sporting failure and all that does is just like with school kids getting a prize for coming last is ensure no one bothers to try harder next time.



If you have and expanded WCC with one place for the league champions and one for the premiers neither competition would be pointless.

The bit in red is not true. The only times in its history that the RL champions have been the team with the most league points were the inaugural season in 1895/96 and for about twenty years from the mid seventies up to the first SLGF in 1998. For the vast majority of its history the RL champions have been the winner of a playoff final after a short competition involving the highest placed group of teams during the preceding league. It used to be called the Championship Final until the original playoff system ended in the 70s. Between the inaugural season and the inception of the Championship playoffs the league was decided on a percentage basis (not the number of points) due to clubs devising their own fixture lists and many playing very different numbers of games during a season.

There are pros and cons with having a playoff system and not everyone may like having one but a playoff system has been the method used for determining the champions for the vast majority of seasons in RL.

For me i have no issue in the Playoff winners being crowned champions even if it is a team finishing 5th. The problem i have is that teams can just coast through the regular season and into the playoffs. If you take the last 2 years then the best 2 teams were Wire and Wigan, but what if Leeds had played as well all year as they did in Sep/Oct, would they have topped the league, possibly? With the current system there is no incentive for them to play as well in the 1st 27 rounds, naturally you would expect any team to play to 100% every time they take the field but watch the Leeds team who won at DW in Sep and compare them to the Leeds team who were battered in June at Headlingley, and you can see the difference in mentality. We need to change that but im not sure what the answer will be, sadly the system we have seems to be the one that suits all 14 clubs best.

No it would make the play-offs an extended post season jolly. We would be playing a competition where the ‘champions’ have already been decided.

For the vast majority of our history as a game, the champions have been the team which is consistent enough to qualify for the play-offs, and good enough to beat the big sides, in the big games, when the pressure is on. I like, that i think that is the best way of deciding who is the champion side. I want to know who is the best, who can play to the highest level when it counts, im not really interested in who can consistantly win against the smaller sides.
The champions have already been decided, the play-offs would be a damp squib, a sure fire set up for ‘after the lord mayors parade’. Play-offs are no longer the play-offs, they would be a short cup competition between a small amount of teams.. Why would people hold any value in it?
We wouldn’t have a premier and minor premier, we would league champions and post-season cup winners. It would make the play-offs pointless Why should it be the most important? Why should we prize being consistent over being good? Why should we prize quantity over quality?

There would be no point to the play-offs. It would be the worst of both worlds. If you are that desperate for the league to decide the champions rather than the traditional way we have decided our champions then don’t bother with the play-offs at all.
European football is in the minority of world wide sports to decide its champions that way. Far Far Far more sports throughout the world decide their champions in the way we do now, and have traditionally done.
The season does matter. Wigan just got it wrong this year, they peaked at the wrong time and were pretty poor for the last quarter of the year. It is a lazy analysis to say that Leeds didn’t try throughout the season and just came good at the end, whilst poor ol’ wigan went out in every game to win with a Corinthian spirit of fair play in their hearts, giving their all as sport should be. Its nonsense. Leeds train to peak at different points throughout the season. They have accepted that they cant be at 100% throughout the year. This means there are periods of the season when they play poorly, not deliberately, but because their fitness training is designed to factor in low periods because they need high periods. That’s why they win games in bunches, and lose games in bunches. Wigan didn’t do that, they tried to be 100% all the time, this meant that they had one long high period and one long low period. So when they met teams early in the season, on their low period, Wigan were playing at a higher level and blew them away, but at the end of the year when other teams where in their high period, like the last quarter of the year, Wigan lost 2 games v Leeds, against Wire and against St’s Wigan lost 5 of their last 12 games, they weren’t unlucky in one result going out to Leeds, they weren’t caught on the hop by a team who hadn’t tried throughout the season, they expended so much energy winning games early in the year that at the business end of the season they weren’t good enough to win the big games. I cant say I have too much sympathy for a team which won so many early season games, and lost so many of the late season games not being champions.
Some people are questioning the validity of the competition because they dont understand what happened. Because Leeds set themselves up correctly to win the competition early season form meant they looked worse than they were, they were playing below themselves whilst others played above. Because Wigan didnt set themselves up correctly to win the competition their early season form made them look better than they were. Wigan peaked in late May/early june, they didnt win a big game after that.

Idont dispute that.

That’s just a straw man, nobody has argued a league structure cannot possibly deliver an exciting end of season, just that it wont always and it leaves the possibility of large parts of the season being completely pointless.
It is nothing like that at all.
The play-offs would be pointless and idea goes against your own principle. If the league competition is the be all and end all of deciding quality then there is no need for the play-offs. If we accept your principle then the 2nd place team deserves the 2nd spot. They have, according to you, proven themselves the 2nd best team in the league. The play-offs would be pointless in a sporting sense because you have completely removed the legitimacy of them. They would be, the RL equivelant of the intertoto cup.

Similarly you could say, compare the Wigan team that played against Leeds in June at Headingley and compare it to the Wigan team which lost twice v Leeds, once v Sts, once V Wire, and once v Bradford in the last 12 games of the season. Its not coasting, its just the acceptance that you cant be 100% every time.

The answer to giving more meaning to the 27 rounds is to have 14 clubs who are viable play-off contenders, where the gap between 1st and 8th 10pts not 20-30 points. Where a couple of extra losses here and there are the difference between being in and out of the play-offs.

next season there are at least 7 teams who I can see being competitve & being instrumental come the play offs - Leeds, Wire, Saints, Wigan, Hull, Cats, Hudds - that's a pretty good state of affairs.

It is, and if we had 10 teams doing that, then the league would be about as good as we could reasonably expect. If we had 10 realistic challengers then that would 2 didn’t even qualify for the play-offs.

For years we heard how anyone beating anyone, and any one of the play-off qualifiers being real contenders was one of the NRL’s main strengths, one of the reasons they were so good. We have a team from 5th win it and the whole thing becomes pointless.

It's pretty good in the sense that you can't really call who'll finish where, or who'll end up winning the competition - but it'd be even better if those 7 were chasing 5 play-off spots.

As it is, all 7 can probably coast through much of their 2013 campaign without having to raise their intensity, even when playing against each other, because they all know they'll be there when it comes down to the business end.

Also, given the discontent from some quarters over Leeds winning it from 5th, imagine the fuss if Huddersfield did it from 7th next season - even though they were tipped as 'competitive' from the outset. By neccessity, the teams finishing 7th and 8th will end the regular season with losing records, or something very close to it, so there'll be a perception of them having been crap for six months, much like there has been with Leeds for the past couple of years. Would that make them unworthy Champions?

No it isn't. It means that 7 places in the 8 are nailed on, so those 7 can coast through the regular season.

It's not a straw man - it is an argument put forward in favour of a play off system as often as the equally ridiculous notion that with a league "large parts of the season being completely pointless".



Of course it is. Teams can get the prize of a play off place for losing more league games than they win. It is a reward for mediocrity if ever there was one.



Now this IS a straw man argument. The problem with this idea is in your head. It's really simple. We have an extended WCC and the route into it is by either winning the league title or winning a play-offs. We then get round your objection of "large parts of the season being completely pointless" because we have retained the play-offs with a valuable prize at the end of them AND we have the league championship deciding the - league champions. Completely different competitions with different purposes with the label of champions being attached to the league champions rather than the winners of the play offs.

It is a straw man because nobody is arguing that there cannot possibly be an exciting finish to a league structure, There can and there will be examples where there was an exciting finish to a league season. There is however, also plenty of examples where the league competition was decided months before the end, where the declaration of champions became a procession, you want to bring up the example of the last premier league season as an exciting finish then yes, I would agree, but that would be countered by the year before where Man Utd won the league by 9 points, went top in November and didn’t go below that. The league was also won with a 1-1 draw against Blackburn which is about as far from exciting as you can get.

Qualification for the play-offs isn’t the prize, winning them is. Qualification for the play-offs isn’t a reward, its survival in the competition.

You really don’t seem to have thought this through. It doesn’t address the ‘large parts of the season being pointless’ at all, because once the play-offs have been qualified for, and the LLS being out of reach, we would be in exactly the same position as now, where (according to you) there is no reason for Leeds to exert themselves finishing higher than 5th. Leeds had a poor start to the year, the vast majority of their losses came in the early part of the season, by time the business end of the season came round the LLS was out of reach. Leeds would have been in exactly the same position as they were no, and would be able to coast in to the play-offs as you accuse them of.

The fact that we are needing to invent a super-special prize for the play-offs shows you have removed the legitimacy of it. You don’t win the Super League for the trophy, or the ring, or the WCC, you win it to be champions. The most important reward for winning SL isn’t entry to the WCC, it isn’t that trophy, the super-special prize is being champions. The competition has value in and of itself. You take that away from the play-offs and all you have is cup comp whose only meaning is to qualify for a different cup comp. You have invented the Intertoto cup.

But I don't expect them to, just as I don't believe they have in the past. I can't remember many or any games where losing teams were coasting. Sure, teams, if they have any brains, tailor their season to the play offs but I still don't believe that professional athletes aren't trying. I remember a game from the end of the season, WIdnes & some other basement dweller, which was an absolute cracker even though their seasons were apparently over weeks before.



The fuss is mainly from bitter fans of those teams who were expected to contend the final & didn't. Personally I thought it was a fantastic achievement by Leeds which I thoroughly enjoyed, despite not being a Rhinos supporter.

I was ok with this (albeit I comprehensively dispute every point you make) until the bit in bold. It is after all just your opinion and you're entitled to it. However, the bit in bold shows unbelievable arrogance! We don't understand what really happened??? Really??? Well thanks for enlightening us. I don't know how I ever managed until you came along. If you could see fit to explain the rest of this baffling world we live in I'd be ever so grateful! Suffice to say I, along with many others, am not happy watching and paying for meaningless games. You quite obviously are. Enjoy.