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The raw data that proves Super Rugby Pacific is currently a cut above
By Dimitri Perrin reporting from Brisbane
Why is Super Rugby Pacific so exciting this season?
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There is a positive mood surrounding Super Rugby Pacific.
Attendances are up 34%, viewership figures are on the rise as well (+12% in New Zealand, +17% in Australia, and +41% in Fiji), and there is no doubt that the 2025 season has been very exciting to date.
But why have the first seven rounds of the competition been so exciting?
It is true that winning margins have reduced, but that is only part of the story.
There is more to the drama we have been enjoying.
To appreciate how unique the 2025 Super Rugby Pacific season has been, we need to look at other seasons and other competitions.
As a Data Science academic, I like to work with data to understand various systems, and in my role with the Queensland Reds, I have the opportunity to look at rugby even more closely than I normally would as a fan. Let’s go on a data adventure together and look at Super Rugby Pacific (SRP), the Top 14 and the United Rugby Championship (URC) over the last three years.
The seasons run on different calendars, so we will call 2024/25 the current season (because they all finish in 2025, irrespective of when they start). 2023/24 is last year, and 2022/23 is the year before.
There are several metrics that make the current Super Rugby Pacific season remarkable.
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Winning margins
For all three seasons, the average winning margin in the Top14 is about 13 points. In all seasons, the median margin (meaning half the games have a larger margin and half the games have a smaller one) is between 8.5 and 10 points.
In the URC, the average margin is roughly 11 to 15 points, and the median margin is 7.5 to 14 points.
The previous two SRP seasons were characterised by larger margins: average margin of 16 points, and median margin of 13 points.
This season, however, is very different. Super Rugby Pacific went from having the largest margins to having the lowest: average margin is just above 11 points and half of the game are decided by 7 points or less.
| Competition | Season | Average margin | Median margin |
| Top 14 | 2022/23 | 12.98 | 10.0 |
| Top 14 | 2023/24 | 13.30 | 10.0 |
| Top 14 | 2024/25 | 12.50 | 8.5 |
| URC | 2022/23 | 15.44 | 14.0 |
| URC | 2023/24 | 13.90 | 10.0 |
| URC | 2024/25 | 11.45 | 7.5 |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2022/23 | 16.12 | 13.5 |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2023/24 | 16.83 | 13.0 |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2024/25 | 11.38 | 7.5 |
The trend is still there if we specifically look at margins within 3 points or within 7 points.
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They are useful thresholds, because they represent games where a penalty or a try at the death could have changed the outcome.
While you typically expect somewhere between 15% and 20% of games to finish within 3 points, this climbs to 23.5% for the current Super Rugby Pacific season (and 33% for the current URC season).
And instead of 32% of games decided by less than a converted try in previous Super Rugby Pacific games, it now happens half the time (50%), which is the highest across the three leagues.
Crucially, we also see a lack of complete blowouts. Only two games have finished with a margin is 25 points or more (just under 6% of the games played so far), when it happened 20% to 28% of the time in previous SRP seasons and still happens about 14% of the time in the URC and Top14.
| Competition | Season | Margins within 3 points | Margins within 7 points | Margins above 25 points |
| Top 14 | 2022/23 | 15.9% | 42.3% | 16.5% |
| Top 14 | 2023/24 | 18.1% | 39.6% | 14.8% |
| Top 14 | 2024/25 | 19.3% | 44.3% | 14.3% |
| URC | 2022/23 | 17.4% | 34.7% | 20.1% |
| URC | 2023/24 | 20.1% | 44.4% | 19.4% |
| URC | 2024/25 | 33.0% | 50.0% | 13.4% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2022/23 | 15.5% | 32.1% | 20.2% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2023/24 | 17.9% | 32.1% | 28.5% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2024/25 | 23.5% | 50.0% | 5.9% |
Lead changes
Of course, a tight margin is not always enough to create drama. Imagine a team leading by 12 points for most of the second half, and conceding a try on the last play. The final margin is within 7 points, but the end of the game was not necessarily very engaging.
Instead, we can look at how many times the lead is changing. The current Super Rugby Pacific season has the highest number of changes on average. Remarkably, in all competitions and all seasons, the median number of lead changes is 3. The only exception is the current Super Rugby Pacific season, where half the games have at least 4 lead changes.
This certainly creates drama.
| Competition | Season | Average number of lead changes | Median number of lead changes |
| Top 14 | 2022/23 | 3.3 | 3.0 |
| Top 14 | 2023/24 | 3.0 | 3.0 |
| Top 14 | 2024/25 | 3.3 | 3.0 |
| URC | 2022/23 | 2.9 | 3.0 |
| URC | 2023/24 | 3.1 | 3.0 |
| URC | 2024/25 | 3.4 | 3.0 |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2022/23 | 3.8 | 3.0 |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2023/24 | 3.2 | 3.0 |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2024/25 | 4.4 | 4.0 |
We can also look at the number of times where a team takes the lead, and keeps it all the way to the final whistle.
While we see such games 27% to 39% of the time in general, it only happened 5 times out of 34 Super Rugby Pacific games this season (14.7%).
| Competition | Season | Games without a lead change |
| Top 14 | 2022/23 | 29.1% |
| Top 14 | 2023/24 | 37.4% |
| Top 14 | 2024/25 | 28.6% |
| URC | 2022/23 | 38.9% |
| URC | 2023/24 | 27.1% |
| URC | 2024/25 | 33.9% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2022/23 | 27.4% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2023/24 | 35.7% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2024/25 | 14.7% |
No lead is safe
With so many lead changes, being in front is not enough to guarantee a positive outcome. In fact, even being a couple of scores ahead is not sufficient.
For close to one in every five games with a reversed lead (17.7%), the losing team had been at least 10 points in front at some point in the game. It is the second highest value across the 9 seasons considered, and almost double the frequency at which it happens in the Top14.
| Competition | Season | Games where the losing team lead by 10+ points |
| Top 14 | 2022/23 | 13.7% |
| Top 14 | 2023/24 | 12.6% |
| Top 14 | 2024/25 | 10.7% |
| URC | 2022/23 | 14.6% |
| URC | 2023/24 | 16.0% |
| URC | 2024/25 | 19.6% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2022/23 | 14.3% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2023/24 | 10.7% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2024/25 | 17.7% |
Last-minute victories
Lead changes create drama, but this year, they also happen particularly late in the game. We can look at the number of lead changes after the break, or in the last 10 minutes, or even in the last 5 minutes. Across all categories, the current Super Rugby Pacific season stands out.
The majority of the games (almost 60%) have at least one lead change in the second half. It does not mean that the team leading at the break lost the game (as there could have been two lead changes in the second half, for instance) but it shows that, at the very least, it was not plain sailing.
All other leagues and seasons are at least 10 percentage points lower.
These lead changes can also happen very late. Almost a third of Super Rugby Pacific games this season have had a lead change beyond the 70-minute mark (32.4%), and close to one in five (17.7%) changed lead after 75 minutes.
On average, just about one SRP game every weekend has been decided in the last five minutes! Apart from the current URC season (17.9%), this is usually closer to 10%.
| Competition | Season | Games with lead changes after the break | Games with lead changes after 70′ | Games with lead changes after 75′ |
| Top 14 | 2022/23 | 44.0% | 16.5% | 11.0% |
| Top 14 | 2023/24 | 35.7% | 17.0% | 11.5% |
| Top 14 | 2024/25 | 45.7% | 18.6% | 13.6% |
| URC | 2022/23 | 36.8% | 10.4% | 7.6% |
| URC | 2023/24 | 43.1% | 18.1% | 11.1% |
| URC | 2024/25 | 48.2% | 25.0% | 17.9% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2022/23 | 39.3% | 15.5% | 11.9% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2023/24 | 39.3% | 11.9% | 10.7% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2024/25 | 58.8% | 32.4% | 17.7% |
Surprises everywhere
Whether Gary Lineker was right in saying that “Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win”, it highlights that, in any sport, if the same teams always tend to win, it can reduce engagement.
Uncertainty is perhaps the most striking feature of the current Super Rugby Pacific season.
Looking at the other leagues and seasons, we would normally expect a third of the games to have a reversed outcome compared to the same game in the previous season: 31% to 39%, with only the current URC season slightly higher at 44%.
The script is completely flipped for Super Rugby Pacific. Across the first seven rounds, the majority of games are reversed! Close to 60% of games are won by the team that lost the corresponding fixture last year.
Of course, Super Rugby Pacific does not currently use a complete home-and-away round robin format, so some fixtures have opposite home and away teams compared to the previous season. For instance, the Reds travelled to Dunedin in round 6 to play the Highlanders, but hosted them in Brisbane last season.
However, this does not explain the high number of reversed outcomes, for two reasons:
- The format is not new, and previous seasons have similar patterns to other leagues.
- If we split between games that are exact repeats of last season and games that have opposite home and away teams, both still have a majority of reversed outcomes: 57% and 64%, respectively.
There is something genuinely unique about the current SRP season.
| Competition | Season | Games with a reversed outcome compared to the previous season |
| Top 14 | 2022/23 | 35.3% |
| Top 14 | 2023/24 | 31.4% |
| Top 14 | 2024/25 | 34.2% |
| URC | 2022/23 | 37.5% |
| URC | 2023/24 | 34.0% |
| URC | 2024/25 | 44.6% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2022/23 | 33.3% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2023/24 | 39.3% |
| Super Rugby Pacific | 2024/25 | 58.8% |
More of the same please!
More points, more lead changes, more last-minute reversals, and more unexpected results. No wonder Super Rugby Pacific has felt so exciting!
And the best part is that the season is far from over.
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Another metric to capture that distances SRP from the Nth and speaks to integrity is capturing time ball is not in play for ‘injuries’, scrum resets and lineouts as it is well known teams from a certain country factor this into their game to combat pace. So a metric actually pin-pointing slowing the game down would be a refreshing way to measure engagement
Hi JS. I have actually been looking at ‘dead time’, and there is a change this year. That analysis still needs some work before it can be shared, but it might get there eventually.
Your links are private if you were intending them to be shared.
URC us doing very well with it’s competitiveness given that each group has it’s own salary caps and entirely different makeups, from clubs, to provinces, to franchises and regions. One group might be teams from the most populace country with the biggest rugby base while another the smallest, with the least amount of rugby players to chose from.
I would also be interested in a average clock length (don’t need to go into the whole BIP hole) showing how long the last phases are taking (because one team is trying to still alter the match points outcome in some way) to complete before the game finally ends. I don’t know if its more common this year but in general I wonder if its a stat that can show how good games are/were?
You really had the same reversed 10 points lead % as you had lead changes after the 75th?
Some of these values while standing out numerically against each other have a much less correlative impact than some that tighter differences which might only stick out a small amount. While SRP’s ones might not necessarily be such examples (and here I’m still going off the basic principle that everyone knew this was happening, even though I was challenged about that assumption) they have had the advantage of the fixtures being were doctored even more than normal. In this instance its irrelevant whether they were doctored or not of course, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that there hasn’t been a lot of cross over of worst v best yet. Maybe it just feels like that because the worst are so much better this year? I definitely think that it is undeniable that all the bottom teams (that remain) have gotten better.
So I would be very interested in another weight graph of the games still, but regardless I don’t think it’s fair for SRP to claim anything over the other leagues yet. Certainly as I have said numerous times about the Top 14, it’s sub par compared to what it’s billed up to be, but that is the only league in this group that has promotion and relegation, which is the antitheses of a competitive league, so a trade off there.
Thank you very much for sharing your research though Dmitri, I hope you find another topic to get interested about!
Hi JW. Thanks for your comment.
I am aware that there is an issue with links. I have flagged it to RugbyPass very soon after it was published (links were fine on my end), and I hope it will be fixed soon.
I have started looking at clock length (and amount of ‘dead time’). It needs more work, but there are interesting differences.
The length of the last play is interesting. So far, I had only looked at the length of the first play.
Yes I did. Not necessarily the same games, of course, but the same number of games.
After round 8, it is now 20.5% for 10-point reversed leads (see Tahs against Moana) and 15.4% for lead changes after the 75th (as it did not happen in any of the 5 games).
I completely agree. As I wrote in another comment somewhere, the title is not from me. 😅
Talk about clutching at straws.
I love this analysis so much - thank you for providing it Dimitri.
I would suggest that a competition with an average margin of above 12 points is unsustainable. Super Rugby needs to really look closely at why this year is so tight and do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
Also with lead changes, there is a reason basketball is so popular
I don’t really think that’s the case at all. One thing he didn’t go into was say consecutive scoring lead changes or comebacks.
If the league shows to be high scoring, then doesn’t that mean even a 12 margin with 5 to go (or so 12 at the end too) is still very much game on.
For instance, some of the games that he found in that 25 points bracket, might have still had the same amount of lead changes?
Perhaps though if such instances had such ‘competitive’ markers, it would mean statistically that there is not a lot of them (that you wouldn’t get a 12 avg)?
Thanks Ed, much appreciated.
There are many factors that could each partly explain what we are seeing this season in SRP (redistribution of talent, sped-up games, etc.). It makes it difficult to ensure that it stays like this, but I agree it would be nice if it could.
Credible stuff.
Any reason the English Prem is not in the table Dmitri? Just sayin….😉
Hi NB. I will probably include the Premiership if I repeat the analysis at the end of the season. I had limited time now, and the change of format (with teams disappearing mid-season, etc.) made it difficult to automate the analysis.
Haha Too low in quality to be on the list Nick Hehehe!
Exactly!! Excitement/lead changes can also equal sub standard defending and teams unable to leverage leads.
I find it difficult to find anything meaningful in these stats. One sixty point blow-out or one very tight game where the lead changes six or seven times skews the figures completely. Secondly these stats do not take into account the level of play in the various leagues. Happy for rugby that viewership in the SR Pacific comp is growing - but still a fraction of the viewership in the URC or Top 14. So this table proves the SR Pacific is becoming more competitive and my next question is compared to what? This Lions tour is going to be very revealing and I sincerely hope the Aussies can grab a Lion’s Tout scalp - but for now comparisons between NH and SH comps is a bit empty of substance. I mean if it’s sheer excitement fans are looking for top schoolboy rugby offers that in spades.
Lovely to see of course but we already knew that SR was the best comp in the world. 😁Hoe you are reading this Nick Bishop LOL.
7 matches out of one season doesn’t prove much. Lead changes is a sure sign of poor defenses. The English Premiership might beat RP on a lot of these metrics and odd that it wasn’t included.
Excitement doesn’t also mean quality and we can see last week things beginning to return to type as extended squads get tested deeper in the seasons with a few big victories.
Shots fired🤣