I was asked to do this writeup way back on August 30th, and I have always had it in the back of my mind that I would have to get it done by the end of January at the latest – As the new season of Supercoach will open on Feb 1st and we will lose all the data from the 2011 season. So here it is… I have left it until pretty late, but better late than never they say, yeah? The first idea was to do it during the final week of Supercoach, but I did not feel comfortable with that as we were celebrating the seasons of Impromptu, Yamum and Shagga at that time, so I thought it a bit inappropriate to join in on that… but Walesy, myself and others involved do believe that this was a really interesting exercise and definitely worthy of its own writeup.

Leading up to last footy season, it was proposed by eckie that we set up a TS Supercoach league where everyone starts with the same side, so that we can level the playing field and see who reigns supreme by doing best trades etc. We got 16 interested people very quickly and we set about organising the rules and starting team.

The basic/main rule was that we all had to have the same 33 players for round 1. Three league members gave proposals of a starting team and we had a vote for which one we went with, with the winner being the following team that was proposed by LiQuiD_SiXx:

Quote from LiQuiD_SiXx on March 16, 2011, 21:00

Backs: Goddard, Gibbs, Deledio, H.Shaw, Grimes, Otten, Heppell (Duigan, Toy, Lower)

Mids: Swan, Judd, Montagna, D.Swallow, Conca, Harris (Hibberd, Pittard, Bewick)

Rucks: Sandilands, Cox (Z.Smith, Keeffe)

Fwds: N.Riewoldt, Franklin, Rioli, Goodes, Sylvia, A.Krakouer, Prestia (Matera, Richardson, Darling)

$5400 in the bank

Now, over the break you’ll be able to find how the season panned out:::::::

We actually started with what we thought were 17 people playing as there was one more than the full league, but when round 1 games took place we learnt that there were 2 players that didnt change around their teams (leaving bye players on the field, and no captain etc) and there was 1 team that mustn’t have understood the brief as they started with completely different players.

For the remainder of this article I will only discuss the teams that actually started with the initial 33 as planned, and I will also exclude 1 of the teams that didnt set their team up for round 1, as they did not end up doing it for the entire season.

Round 1 was very interesting as (among set up teams that started with correct 33) there was a points spread of 179 points between 1st and 14th, demonstrating that a lot can be gained from selecting captains and bench players well. And, I want to point out that the league was ranked 11th overall after round 1, despite two teams scoring less than 2000 with no captains and zeros on field.

The end of Round 1, brought about the first chance to trade, and only one team traded (that we knew of), and interestingly, it was one of the teams that didnt select their captain in round 1, and it turned out that they didnt select a cap for round 2 as well!?! When lockout hit for Round 3, the trades came flooding in to the forum thread, with a majority of people bringing in some prized rookies that we had missed on in the starting team – such as Liberatore, Tapscott and Curnow.

The first big risky trades that we knew of, were by FunkSoulBrother, who traded out two Saint premiums when they had the bye in R4: BJ and Joey out for GAJ and Boomer. In hindsight they werent too bad, as Harvey started playing really well and Goddard and Joey had fairly inconsistent seasons – but GAJ ended up not playing that week, and FSB did run out of trades early which cost him at the end.

The first of the multibye rounds spread the teams out a lot. Almost all of us were required to make at least 1 trade to avoid zeros, and it changed our teams a lot. After 3 rounds there were only 108 points separating the top 8; however just 1 week later, there was a difference of 250 between the top 4, and 302 between the top 8!

Almost half way through the season,at the completion of 11 rounds, the ladder looked like this:

CaseysCrushers 24170

Anthak II 24167 (3)

NtThunda 24123 (47)

SaintsBoys 24074 (96)

Bird Is The Word 23921 (249)

Bookie 23800 (370)

Buzz II 23720 (450)

Blackest Caviar 23486 (684)

Off&Trading 23448 (722)

The Baron VonGinasII 23437 (733)

Team Ramrod 23295 (875)

CrownJulz the 2nd 23224 (946)

D Of A Perfect Square 22999 (1171)

PNG Raskols 22790 (1380)

*** Take note of where Buzz II is placed as they come home strong.

Rounds 13 and 14 were interesting at the top, as I ranked 13th for the round in R13 and moved about 200 points ahead of FunkSoulBrother, but then he scored a big one in R14 and moved 107 ahead of me. We then swapped spots again in both of the following two weeks as well. Despite starting with the same team – all the teams had a fair few PoDs by this stage.

After Round 15, here is the top 6, their score, and how many trades they had remaining:

1. Casey Crushers 33,562 – 3 trades remaining

2. anthak II 33,454 (-108) – 2 trades

3. SaintsBoys 33,180 (-382) – 8 trades

4. Bird is the Word 32,939 (-623) – 8 trades

5. NTthunda 32,867 (-695) – 5 trades

6. Buzz II 32,794 (-768) – 7 trades

This is really interesting. The two of us up top obviously went hard with our trades early on, as we were nearly out by round 16, and the rest of the top 6 were a lot more conservative – but were they too far back for it to matter?

* and its worth noting here, that FSB had used all his trades just 2 weeks later.

After Round 16, the two top teams in this comp, FunkSoulBrother and anthak II were respectively ranked 109th and 108th overall.

In round 18, I ranked 50th for the week and moved up to 61st overall, and had built a fair lead on FunkSoulBrother who was still in 2nd place, but by the end of round 21, FSB had narrowed the margin to just 234 points and there were only 2 other teams within 1000 points of 1st place.

With two rounds to go, FSB had narrowed the margin moreso. Here is how the ladder looked:

1. anthak II  50,201

2. Casey Crushers 50,027

3. Bird is the Word 49,578

4. Buzz II 49,531

5. SaintsBoys 49,231

6. NTthunda 48,989

So there was less than 200 points in it between 1st and 2nd with 2 games to go.

rumRoll:

And then the final standings for the league were:

It is hard to tell who took this seriously and who didnt, but I do know that the team in 14th was the person who came up with the whole idea. The team that finished 10th, was one of the ones that wasnt selecting their captains early on, but finished strong. Julz in 12th spot was playing properly for most of the season – but did miss lockout on one of the multibye weekends, which hurt a lot. And the team in 8th spot was the one in the separate league that played out the entire season, although admitted that his attention turned to his league from about round 13 onwards. And a good indication that most were still playing seriously was that 9 or 10 of the 14 teams scored over 2200 in round 24.

While on Round 24… the top 2 points scorers overall were the 2 teams that made the granny, and anthak II beat Buzz II 2544 to 2396. FWIW, Team Ramrod beat D Ofa PerfectSquare in the minor finals granny 2412 to 2342.

Now if anyone is interested, here are all the trades from the winning team:

I was particularly happy with the trades in Rounds 5, 8 and 15, as all the players I brought in in those rounds went on good runs immediately after – and some were a bit left field. And some rounds that didnt turn out so good were bringing in Polec, Hargreave, Broughton and Hurn.

My final team finished ranked 190th overall and looked like this (how it lined up in R24):

B: Goddard, Delidio, Gibbs, Enright, Hurn, Gram, Puopolo (Broughton, Johnson, Hargreave)

M: Pendlebury, Swan, Judd, Ablett, Boyd, Montagna (Pavlich, Mzungu, Callinan)

R: Cox, ZSmith (Keefe, Tippett)

F: Goodes, OKeefe, Harvey, Gray, Petrie, NReiwoldt, ISmith (Franklin, Darling, Richardson)

In conclusion, this was a really interesting exercise and hopefully we can take something from it to help us in the coming season. I do believe it showed that it is an advantage to trade hard early, but also to leave a couple of trades up your sleeve for later in the season.

What do you all think?

And I would love to hear from others that were involved – what were your thoughts on the comp and what strategies did you play… and did you play all season?