The NRL didn’t nail the kick-off experiment. One change would perfect it
Melbourne beat Brisbane 46-20 at Suncorp on Thursday night, and somewhere inside that scoreline the NRL’s new kick-off option quietly buried itself.
It was trialled, used three times, and twice it handed the advantage to the side already winning.
Clinton Gutherson prepares to kick off. Getty Images
The objective, though, is exactly right, and testing it on the field beats theorising in a committee room. A match still alive in the final 20 minutes is worth more to everybody who touches it: it holds an audience to full-time, keeps the back half of a telecast valuable, and feeds the numbers behind broadcast deals and player payments.
Nobody in rugby league profits from a 46-20.
The ambition is not the problem. The mechanism is.
The idea’s provenance matters because it has been widely described as an NFL rule. It has not been one since the Great Depression and the war years. The NCAA had it until 2003.
What the NRL has borrowed now sits only in American high school football, where the team scored against designates who kicks off.
That distinction matters because the NFL and NCAA discarded the rule as outmoded: useful when field position counted for more than ball possession, of no place in the modern game.
In American football possession renews itself, as 10 yards in four downs earns four more until the opposition’s goal line. Possession is not as scarce there as it is in rugby league, so the side scored against, high schoolers included, takes the ball every time without a thought.
Rugby league has been here before. In 1966 it took the four downs of American football and made four tackles, adopting the number without the application, and it took six years and a move to six tackles before the arithmetic worked into the game we love today.
We have done it again, importing from a code where the values of position/possession are different from ours.
The deeper problem is who the rule rewards. At the 51st minute Ben Hunt scored for Brisbane, 30-14, and Melbourne, sixteen points clear and briefly down to 12 men, took the option and won the ball from the restart. At the 75th, Ezra Mam went over untouched for Brisbane, 42-20, and Melbourne, 22 clear, took it again.
Twice the Storm were handed a structural advantage for the crime of leading by three converted tries.
Storm star Nick Meaney scores against the Broncos. Getty Images
Brisbane declined at 6-0 and again at 24-4, when the choice was still worth something, and took it once at 42-14, when the match was gone. The side that needed help used it too late.
The side that needed nothing used it twice. This is the wrong groove entirely and somebody has pulled the wrong lever because it keys off who conceded last rather than who is actually behind.
Elite sport is entertainment, not the same proposition as participatory or community sport. Its principal product is the close contest. Community competitions understand that well enough to run mercy rules.
I am not arguing for one, certainly not at the premier level of our game, but for a proven structural method of keeping matches hard fought. Codes achieve it differently.
At one end, soccer and baseball keep single goals and runs enormously valuable, so no deficit is trivial. At the other, basketball offers a near continuous exchange of scoring, so leads are never safe. Rugby league sits between.
Unlike rugby union, with its unlimited phases and the NFL with its renewable downs, we contest the ball, usually with a bomb on the fifth tackle, or lose it on the sixth. That produces a dynamic no other code has, and one the modern game has amplified: momentum.
Momentum now compounds faster than ever, much of it from the six again awarded deep in yardage, back towards a side’s own 20 metre line, restoring a full set exactly where fatigue and field position are already turning.
Storm fullback Sualauvi Faalogo loves momentum. Getty Images
Teams do not merely score, they accumulate. The blowout is no longer the exception.
To mitigate this reality, the answer is better rubber-banding, a term I used for nine.com.au when arguing the 20/40 rule does not do its job. It is a concept made popular in gaming and esports, where the trailing competitor gets greater access to high-impact opportunities at decisive moments. It keeps contests tight without removing the need for execution.
So make the rule do the job it was intended to do. Let the team with fewer points after a scoring event elect to kick or receive. Not the team that conceded last. The team that is behind.
What I propose is not novel. The Pacific Coast Conference voted for precisely this in 1934 to stop leading sides freezing games, and it later ran in the North-South game and the Senior Bowl. The NFL declined it in 1959, the NCAA in 1965, both having renewable downs when in possession and therefore no need of it.
Rugby league is the code the idea was waiting for. To those who say this creates chaos in close matches, I disagree. It creates thinking.
Do you take the one-point drop goal immediately, or ‘manage the clock?’ Do you take the now rarer two-point penalty goal; should you miss the kick, you still receive the ball via a 20-metre drop out, then go for the one-pointer with more time off the clock? Or do you just roll up your sleeves and go for that try.
Strategy is an art. This is smart rugby league.
