So the 9 teams out of 14 who wouldn’t qualify, 18 out of your 27 games. How intense are they going to be?

You can lose 10/11 games and finish 5th. The season would literally be over by now for 3 teams this year. Over the next 4 or 5 games it is likely that another 3 or 4 teams will hit that threshold. The season would be over for half of the league after 2/3rds of the season. How intense are the games going to be for them? You are guaranteeing that large parts of the season are a dead rubber for large parts of the league and saying it would promote intensity.

You also moan at what you describe as ‘lets make all 14 teams competitive scenario (Tempted to say rubbish)’, which again, in this context, doesn’t make sense. Whatever concept you choose, whichever play-off system or league system you go for, if half the league are rubbish, then large parts of the season will be a procession. Making those games against lesser sides dead rubbers for those sides isn’t going to make them more intense and competitive it will make them less.



PS

You do have only yourselves to blame anyway. You lost. Who else can you blame for that?

But that is besides the point. Why does winning the hubcap mean more if you still don’t win the GF? Would you be sitting here saying “well we won the hubcap and that is clearly more important now we f@cked up winning the grand final with even more advantages’? Of course not, give the team who wins the hubcap a free pass to the final and a 10 point head start, its still going to be a poor relation, its still going to be a lesser trophy and it is still going to be insignificant compared to the GF and you know it, that’s why your complaint isn’t that we have a GF its that Wigan didn’t win it and they didn’t get enough of an advantage toward winning it.

and for this year with half their season as dead rubbers? just give up, go home, regroup for another go? Doesnt sound like a plan to make the league more intense to me.

I'd like to see three genuine trophies/prize money to go for; League Champs, GF and CC, all roughly equal in terms of prestige and money.

Make the playoffs back to the equivalent of the old (mid 70's to mid 90's) premiership trophy (8 teams, straight knockout, 1st plays 8th etc.).

Champions are the winners at the Old Trafford. The weekly rounds is just a pre competition to get a chance to win be THE champions and a way to seed the teams. Where in theory the higher a finish the easier it should be.

Personally I like the play offs and the fact that come the first Saturday in October two teams battle it out at Old Trafford to become champions. Admittidly the format could do with changing, such as 1v8, 2v7 and so forth and one chance if on the first week the team that finishes 1st gets beat by the team in 8th then good bye to that team until next year.

A bigger problem is the intensity in the weekly rounds. The only way it will happen is for weaker teams to get better, unfortunately I dont have the answers to that!

A couple of posts mention about trying to explain the play off format to football supporters. Who gets promoted from the second division this weekend is Bradford or Northampton where at least two other teams finished higher than either of them and which team would be getting promoted? It wont be Burton or Cheltenham (who finished 4th and 5th).

I find explaining how to use a crayon difficult with most football fans...

Why don't you read what I said again instead of having a pre conceived idea of what you "Think" Im moaning at. It's got nothing to do with wigan not winning it, it's got everything to do with making teams who want to win things play for 30 weeks of the year and not 10ish.

I'm saying that winning the hub cap would mean more because if the top teams were trying to finish top as opposed to now when most probably couldn't give a t0ss then by definition it would mean more as it would be harder to do!
Hence stacking the deck in favour of the top 1/2/3 etc in such a way that they would try harder throughout the season to reach those positions would be a justifiable reward for their hard work.

If any team fail to take advantage of that advantage that's their problem.
I'll invite you to take a look through any posts of mine were I haven't had this view and to be honest that's still my view on the last 2years.
We didn't win it coz we knew the rules and didn't come on top to those rules.

That's not the argument
The argument is how can we turn the apathy to the 27 weekly rounds around.
My answer is make them mean more, do teams in the PL give up half way rough a season when they can't make top 4/5?

How's about ill meet you half way?

Lets let all 14 teams make the play offs?
However

Teams 11/12/13/14 have to play every day for 2 weeks
Teams teams 7/8/9/10 play every other day

Teams 3/4/5/6 play twice in a week

Teams 1/2 play week 1 against the 2 winners of all the other games when their all knackered at end of week 2 and go straight to a grand final week after against each other!

Now basically unless you missed it there is a slight bit of sarcasm in my suggestion,what i am saying is i couldn't give a monkeys about how many clubs you include,
Just make it SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult to win it the lower you get.
Thus making it massively more important to finish as high up in the competition during the weekly rounds as possible.

As it stands the play off structure does not do that to the level of the old top 5 which is why I said let's look back at those games/crowds and compare to the last 4/5 years.

PS

Unlike William Eve I have a life so I won't be rambling on for 100+ pages so you won't have to defend the RFL etc. much more to me.
I'll just keep checking through the curtains and making my own mind up as to whether its sunny in SL world or not rather than let Nigel Wood et al tell me and keep swallowing it.

This whole divide is due to the situation that has developed that the GF winners are the Chamions, yet may not be the best team in the League.
The GF win no more means a team is the best in the League than the C Cup winners. The GF winners have won a four game play off. C Cup is 5 games.
The most difficult to win is the L Leaders Trophy.
That's over 27 games and the team that does it usually has won more than any other team, lost fewer than any other team. Scored more and conceded fewer than any other club.
The L Leaders in RL/SL are vastly undervalued as is their achievement. This is due to the finance and SKY TV hype.
As mentioned previously and it was a very idea IMO is that the three have the same financial rewards and the L Leaders have a trophy worth calling that, not some fancy dish that looks like a mis shapen plate or indeed a hub cap.

Smokey Joe is missing the point here. He mentions we need 14 equal standard teams. We do and I mentioned that in the original post that we don't have enough money(to have 14 equal standard teams)
Next problem is to many teams in the playoffs. More than half the teams will qualify. Basically you've more chance of getting tails when you toss a coin than you have to miss out on the playoffs. In 2 wins time Wigan have nothing left to play for until September apart from the CC. How anyone can think that is good for the game is beyond me.

make it as hard as you like, make a team which doesnt finish top crawl over broken glass to get to OT, give the LLS winners a 30point head start, give them 20 men on the field, and sets of ten tackles to attack with, but only sets of 3 to defend, give them every single possible advantage you can think of then double it, the champions will still be the team which wins the GF and the hubcap will still be the poor relation and still people will barely care about it. People want to be champions, they dont want to be the team with the most advantages. This is what you seem to be unable to understand teams set out to win the GF, the LLS is just a nice bonus along the way that no-one really cares about, reward the LLS with whatever advantages in the play-offs you want, teams will still be setting out to win the GF and the LLS will still be nothing more than a nice bonus along the way that no-one really cares about

make it top 5 and London, salford, cas already dont have anything to play for, within the next month it would be likely that Widnes, Wakefield and Hull KR would join them. How anyone can think that is good for the game is beyond me.

Hm, i think thats the point people are trying to make... Well done..

Really....In all honesty.

Who cares?

Where do I start!
So with 24 points to play for Salford/London/cas/ don't have anything to play for?
24 + 7 =31 in my book and that'll get them a 5th 6th etc. spot any day of the week.

Same goes for the 3 other teams you mention who will still be in the ball game in 4 games time. (Ps - why not mention saints in along with them

).

As for the stuff about Lls and GF I think this is where you're coming undone.
Barring a few posters I think the general consensus is that the go is the way to go "IF" structured better.

We pretty much all agree that the GF is the one we all set out to win

however

By making it easy to finish top 8 and then easier comparatively once in the top 8 compared to the old top 5 to go on and win it then you are devaluing what goes on between rounds 1-27 and that is what most people's concerns are.

Make it harder to win the GF from outside the top 2 and teams will try harder weeks 1-27.

Lets not manufacture a situation where we all get a go at the play offs and its not structured as advantageously for 1&2 or else we'll all just give up in the weekly rounds and just turn up in September.

Then people wonder why there's an apathy to the weekly rounds etc.