The first Wednesday of the 2010 Super 14 season means it’s time for my first Inside The Numbers column of the year. Since the major talking point of week one was the much harsher refereeing of the breakdown area, I’ll be taking a look at how this has affected scoring in the competition.

Two of Fairfax’s star rugby writers, Toby Robson and Duncan Johnstone, penned stories noting that try scoring is down on week one in 2009. They are, of course, correct but perhaps taking too narrow a view of the stats.

Week one of 2010 produced 30 tries, while week one of 2009 gave us 45, a drop of 33%! But the full story is, week one of the 2009 Super 14 was a blip with only week 13 producing more tries (46) and only four weeks out of 14 producing more than 40 tries.

The average number of tries scored in a week in 2009 was 35.57 and three weeks actually produced fewer than 30 tries, so perhaps the drop in try scoring during the first week can be put down to another statistical blip.

So while the esteemed rugby writers of the world pen their editorial columns bemoaning the lack of attacking rugby and claiming that the tough new breakdown interpretations have failed to achieve their goal of more running rugby, because it’s too early to make that kind of comparison yet. One round does not make a season, and the final judgment can really only be made at the end of the round robin.

And here’s an interesting little anomaly: there were actually more points scored in week one of 2010 than in week one of 2009.

As the Super 14 goes into its final week with seven teams still in the hunt for semi final spots, it’s interesting to take a look at what makes the difference between a good team and a poor team, besides the number of wins. So what’s more important, attack or defence?

Attack

Well that almost looks like the points table, except what are the Blues doing in there? Even though they have no chance of making the semi finals, they have the third best attacking record in the tournament. Then there’s the Crusaders, who can secure a semi final spot with a bonus point win over the Blues, but sit eleventh in terms of attack. While it does help to have a good attcking team, it doesn’t guarantee success.

Defence

That’s a bit more like it.Those sitting in four of the top five spots are still in contention for the playoffs, although the Hurricanes sit nineth in this stat, which is something of a surprise.

Finally, what happens if we combine the two:

It would appear that this is the one. The seven teams remaining in contention for the playoffs occupy the top eight places, with the Force, who fell out of contention last week, rounding out the top eight.

The Blues high position in attack but low position in defence, overall margin and the table shows that all out attack without a good defence is useless, while the high ranking of the Crusaders and Waratahs in the defensive stats shows that the old cliche: defence wins championships is still true today.

So perhaps this confirms what we’ve always known about rugby: a good attack is nice, but a good defence is better and if you can have both then your team could be a title contender.

This week Inside The Numbers takes a look at the bonus points system and how alternate proposals would affect the table as it currently stands. Steve Tew, CEO of NZRU, was asked about the bonus points system in a radio interview last week. “The table would look a lot different this year if we didn’t have them,” was his response, but crunching the numbers has led me to a different conclusion.

First, here’s the table as it stands.

Now here’s the table with no bonus points

Spot the difference? There isn’t much of one. The top four remain the top four, the bottom five remain the bottom five and those in the middle only move up or down one place. Even the Blues with their massive 11 bonus points taken away only drop a single place.

But what if we took away those nabby pamby bonus points for losing by less than seven points. Surely these politically correct, reward teams for almost winning points are an abomination and need to go. That will shake the table up!

Would you look at that? The only effect it has on the table is the Brumbies leap up two places into fifth and push the teams ahead of them down one place. This is due to the fact the Brumbies haven’t scored a single close loss bonus point, but other than that the table remains unchanged.

Perhaps we should adopt a more radical approach. Radio Sport’s Nigel Yalden proposed that we do away with bonus points entirely, instead giving teams two points for a home win, three points for a road win and a point for a draw. Yalden added the caveat that this can only work in Super 15 when teams will play seven home and seven road games. Here’s what this table would look like:

Wow! Even the radical rethinking has little effect on the table. Again the top four remain the top four, the bottom five remain the bottom five and those in the middle move up or down a single spot.

It would seem no matter how many points are given to teams for wins and whether a league awards bonus points for scoring more tries or suffering a close loss, the table doesn’t actually change that much. Largely because the most important thing in sports is winning. If a team racks up enough wins, they move up the table, not enough, they move down.

And at the end of the day, the points system is there to sort out who are the top four teams that will play in the semi finals. In the case of all four systems here, it’s the same teams who occupy those spots.

Finally, here’s all four tables side by side for comparison:

On Monday I teased that I had some interesting numbers to share for this week’s column, and finally I do. If you’ve been following me on Twitter (shameless plug) you’ll know I’ve been grappling with some programming issues to generate these figures. I swear I must be the only rugby writer in the world who writes programs to calculate interesting statistics.

Earlier this year I introduced an American statistic to the Super 14 called strength of schedule, a numberical value which tells how difficult a particular team’s draw has been. It’s useful in a competition like the Air New Zealand Cup which isn’t a true round robin but at this stage in a real round robin it tends to regress to around 50. In fact, after the final round I expect the figures to be between 49 and 51.

However, a conditional strength of schedule makes for some very interesting reading. Who has had the toughest home draw so far? Does a tough road draw make for a poor road record? And does a weak schedule in games that you win make you a good team?

The final question is probably the most interesting and a little confusing. Here are the respective strength of schedule numbers when the team wins.

So the Cheetahs only have one win against the second placed Sharks, leading to their high number but where it gets interesting is down the bottom. The Stormers are right down there having beaten the Reds (13th) and the Lions (11th), then come the Blues who some still consider title contenders. The have the second worst winning strength of schedule, meaning their five wins have come against weaker opponents, and the facts bear this out, they’ve beaten the Cheetahs (14th), Stormers (12th), Lions (11th), Highlanders (10th), and Force (9th). The only team in the bottom six they haven’t beaten is the Reds, and that’s because they play them this weekend!

Marginally ahead of the Blues are the table topping Chiefs and the reason for that is simple: Like the Blues their wins have come mostly against teams from the bottom half of the table, the only team they have beaten who is currently placed seventh or higher is the Blues, and we’ve already established they don’t beat good teams.

The last team I’ll mention on this particular stat are the Crusaders, who sit second. The list of team’s they’ve beaten is like a who’s who of semi final contenders, holding wins over the current top three (Chiefs, Sharks and Bulls) as well as the sixth placed Waratahs. Their only win against a bottom half team came over the Stormers. That’s not to say this is good thing, at it means many of their losses have come against lower placed teams.

Figures that jump off the page here are the Cheetahs alarmingly high home strength of schedule. Oddly enough they have only played three games in Bloemfontein so far this season against the Chiefs, Sharks and Brumbies, all top opponents. Due to the scheduling for South African teams, the Bulls have also only played three home games so far this season, but these have all been against weaker teams leading to their remarkably low score.

Overall, the strength of schedule statistic points out which teams have had the easy run and who’s doing it tough. In fact, the weak strength of schedule stats are why I’m not annointing the Chiefs as champs in waiting, in fact right now I’d have to pick the Bulls.

Oops, seems I’m a day late with this week’s Inside The Numbers. The rest for that: I wanted to take a closer look at average margins of victory and defeat, but didn’t have those stats readily available. As a result I has to write a program to calculate it all for me.

So, who’s hot right now? The Chiefs would have to be considered the hottest team in the Super 14 right now, riding a four game win streak and having racked up more than 50 points in their last two outings. Even more impressive is the fact that over their last three games, just three teams had tougher draws.

The other thing I wanted to look at this week was team’s average points and how they affect the outcome of games. For example, the Blues score an average of 28 points per game regardless of whether they win or lose, but when they win they concede just 13 and when they lose they concede 46. If you had any doubts that the Blues’ problems were their defence, there’s the proof.

The Stormers, Chiefs and, interestingly enough, the Highlanders are the teams who tend to win big, all of them having won at least two games and averaging more than an 18 point margin of victory, while the competitions biggest losers are the Blues and Cheetahs, with average losing margins of 17 points. Note that the Bulls do have an average losing margin of 24 points, due to only one loss by that margin.

And finally, the weird statistical anomaly of the week: The Crusaders have conceded the exact numer of points they have scored this season, making their point differential 0.