Would a Super Rugby draft work?

The National Football League draft has just passed, and with it the hype that surrounds the annual event that sees the top footballing talent from American universities picked round-by-round by the league’s 32 franchises.

It’s a spectacle that captures the imagination of the NFL’s global fan base, and the meeting effectively acts as a live transfer event. Supporters hold their nerves and wait in anticipation to see which player is going to be plucked out of the collegiate system to lead their team to glory.

Not only is the NFL draft an experience that provides a variety of intriguing narratives regarding the players’ background, how they’ve risen to such prominence, and where they fit into the sport’s landscape, it’s also one of the fairest ways in which to balance out the strength of a competition.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, the way that the draft works is that the team that finished with the worst record in the preceding season is given the first pick of the next draft, giving them the chance to recruit the best possible player available in a bid to rectify their previous campaign and rebuild for the next one.

The process seems to have worked for the NFL in terms of levelling the playing field between the franchises, as highlighted via the fact that there have been nine different Super Bowl champions in the past 10 seasons.

The success of every team, bar maybe the New England Patriots, has fluctuated vastly in that timeframe. The New York Giants are a prime example of this, with the 2012 Super Bowl champions finishing the 2017 season with the second-worst record in the competition, thus earning themselves the second overall pick of the 2018 draft.

The yearly occurrence of the draft is a key contributing factor towards both their contrasting fortunes in that five-year period, and the overall balance in competition between franchises.

So, with the fanfare that comes with the draft, combined with the fairness and balance that it brings to the league, the question should be asked as to whether it could work within the realm of Super Rugby.

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Given how notoriously lopsided the southern hemisphere’s premier club competition has been in recent years, a draft would have the potential to turn around the fortunes of clubs that have found themselves at the wrong end of the scoreboard on numerous occasions.

However, the rigid eligibility criteria that exists for the national teams of the participating SANZAAR unions would make a competition-wide draft untenable, and that’s without mentioning the probable backlash the concept would receive if one country’s most promising prospect was snapped up by another nation’s struggling outfit.

It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine the outrage among New Zealand fans should someone of say, Etene Nanai-Seturo’s calibre get picked up by the Sunwolves rather than committing himself to one of the five Kiwi franchises.

So, while the possibility of a league-wide draft remains evident, the understandable reluctance of easing up on national team selection policies by coaches, administrators and fans alike prevents this from becoming reality. Instead, why not implicate the draft concept as a recruitment process for New Zealand teams?

In the NFL, a set of criteria is laid down for prospective draftees, with the main rule being that those intending of applying for selection must be three years removed from high school.

With the intensity of recruitment at schoolboy level by scouts from not only rugby sides in New Zealand, but also from offshore clubs and teams from other codes such as rugby league, Aussie Rules, and American football, waiting three years after players have left high school would be far too late for a Super Rugby franchise to offer a contract to the nation’s brightest young talent.

Therefore, it would make sense for the draft pool to be made up of the best secondary school talent on offer at the time. The best way to ensure that New Zealand’s prime talent is made available for the Super Rugby sides to choose from would be to open applications for the draft solely to those who are selected in the New Zealand Schools and NZ Barbarians Schools squads named every September.\

These teams are filled with the crème de la crème of secondary school talent in the country, and – provided that the draft consisted of 10 rounds of picks for each of the five clubs – the minimum draft pool of at least 50 players would be easily filled.

For those that declare themselves ineligible for the draft for reasons such as only being in Year 12 or already having signed for a different code, the best player from each of the franchise’s under-18 squads that missed out on national selection could easily be called in to fill the vacancies.

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The biggest beneficiary of this would undoubtedly be the Blues. The draft would provide Tana Umaga’s men – a team that has trailed its four neighbouring sides for years now – a chance to explore outside of the famed Auckland 1A schoolboy competition.

As one of the finest and most fiercely competitive college competitions on the planet, the Blues have narrowed their recruitment focus almost entirely on that competition. However, as Ben Smith alluded to in his piece a couple of weeks ago, they need to branch outside of their own catchment area if they’re to succeed on club rugby’s biggest stage.

The other franchises have brought in players from outside their catchment areas that have gone on to star in their sides and reach higher honours. Think Damian McKenzie and Anton Lienert-Brown with the Chiefs. Both were born and raised in the South Island, and both played First XV rugby in Christchurch.

Think Tamaki College alumni Vaea Fifita and ex-St Peter’s College star Vince Aso, both of whom travelled down from Auckland to join the Hurricanes in Wellington and win a Super Rugby title in 2016.

Think Jack Goodhue and Israel Dagg for the Crusaders. The former was head boy of Auckland’s Mt Albert Grammar, while the latter was a standout for Lindisfarne College in Napier.

Then you look at the Highlanders, and every one of their key players from the past four years or so – aside from the King’s High School-educated Ben Smith – originated from outside Otago and Southland.

It’s the involvement of players from outside of the system that is one of many missing ingredients for the Blues, and a draft would fix that issue by paving the way for a more prosperous future compared to the bleak situation that they currently find themselves in.

As Super Rugby moves forward and the future of the competition remains uncertain, the ongoing battle for an even playing field across the league between sides is a desire from all involved parties that stays constant.

While a league-wide draft can’t solve the imbalanced nature of Super Rugby in the immediate future, a conference-wide one could certainly help bring the Blues up to speed with its local rivals. The scary prospect of the three-time champions finally unleashing their enormous yet dormant potential might even catapult the New Zealand conference beyond reach of all other competitors from Australia, South Africa, Argentina and Japan.

But, if Super Rugby is to regain the credibility that it once had in its first decade of existence, then small steps like this need to be taken to ensure the tournament is at its peak from a competitive standpoint.

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