The Dolphins joining the NRL has been the feel good story of the rugby league season thus far, but their inaugural season has resulted in the resurrection of one of the sport’s great scourges – bye points.
With a 17-team league, the NRL is dealing with regular byes for the first time since 2006 with each team enjoying three over the course of the season.
Between 2007 and 2022 they were contained to the State of Origin period, where our brains are so addled by the allure of state against state and mate against mate that club football takes a back seat.
But now the bye is back in a huge way and every week there are points being thrown around like so many nickels and dimes.
There’s nothing wrong with the bye itself — it gives weary players a chance to recharge the batteries, offers the opportunity for a bit of a reset and allows long-suffering fans to crack terrible jokes about how their struggling team “would be flat out beating the bye.”
But with each team being awarded two points per bye round, the NRL ladder has been thrown into chaos. Cronulla are sitting in second place with five wins while the third placed Rabbitohs have six victories to their credit. The four-win Panthers are up higher than the five-win Warriors and Dolphins.
Unless you’re up the top, staring at the competition ladder is difficult enough and the only maths that should come into it are the complicated for-and-against equations we all delve into as our teams try and scrape their way into the finals late in the year.
It begs the question, why do bye points exist at all? Why does not playing a game earn the same reward as winning one? The answer delves deep into the very dawn of rugby league back in the 19th century in the north of England, where much of the budding sport’s structures were borrowed from rugby union and soccer.
Many of these competitions were localised, ad-hoc affairs of varying length and, potentially, with odd numbered teams and playing a full home and away season was close to impossible.
Given almost all competitions were decided by virtue of “first past the post”, byes and bye points were introduced to account for these varying schedules in an effort to stop teams being penalised for late rescheduling that were beyond their control.
So when the code eventually emigrated to Australia, byes and bye points followed. They’ve been a part of the deal since the very beginning.
In the sport’s first season in this country back in 1908, bye points helped save the long forgotten and short-lived Cumberland club from the wooden spoon.
The western Sydney club joined the NSWRL after the opening round had already been played, so competition organisers retroactively awarded them a bye and two competition points for Round 1.
Given their inclusion brought the league to nine clubs, each team — including Cumberland — enjoyed one bye through the rest of the season. The extra bye, and the subsequent competition points, proved invaluable when Cumberland, Newtown and Western Suburbs all ended the season with one win each with “The Fruitpickers” avoiding last place because of their tardy entry to the competition. Flush with success, the club promptly folded.
Various clubs joined and left the league in the years that followed but the competition was always kept at an even number until the 1920 season, when University joined as the league’s ninth team.
Even then things weren’t as streamlined as they could be — some teams had two byes but others only had one, due to the bizarre decision to end the season three rounds earlier than scheduled because Balmain were seven points clear of second-placed Glebe and couldn’t be caught.
Byes continued to tip the competition unevenly on occasion through the years to come. In 1925, for example, four of the nine teams in the league had two byes while the rest only had one as a result of the competition again being called off early.
This time it was because South Sydney, undefeated through the year, were ten points clear at the top of the ladder and it was mathematically impossible for anybody else to win.
Bye points are a relic from the earliest days of rugby league in this country but they have long outlived their usefulness.
The last time each team in the league did not play the same number of games (except for the 1996 Super League forfeits), and thus the last time bye points served their true purpose, was in 1936.
But for almost a century since, bye points have endured. With the league slowly becoming more professional and eventually blossoming into a billion-dollar sport that feels light years away from the suburban competition it once was.
Those humble origins are why bye points existed in the first place. As to why they still exist now the answer is simple – that’s just the way it’s always been.