NZI Season 29 Signups

Attention NZ Managers!  The NZI has just seen a brand new champion crowned in the thoroughly unappealing form of Chewy and the Melville RFC.

Could your team be next?

In Season 29 we will be trialling a new format for the Prestigious New Zealand Invitational tournament.  The previous pools/playoffs format will be put aside to make way for a double round-robin format, winner takes all at the end of the season.

Teams will be sorted into groups of 8 and will play each other, home and away, through 14 weeks of the season.  Come the end, the most competition points will see a winner in each tier.  The more teams we have sign up, the more tiers of competition we will have.

To sign up - click here.  Enter your team ID and Register - you will be prompted to verify that you have the correct team before you are confirmed as registered.

A couple of notes:
1) This tournament is only open to NZ-based Managers.  You may enter your non-NZ teams however they will always play their matches Away so as to maintain synchronous timeslots.
2) Matches are played in the Thursday Friendly slot by default.  If you wish you can request to play your matches using Anytime fixtures, which will be played at 2:35pm on Thursdays (NZ Time).  If you are not a Premium manager then we cannot guarantee you will be able to play Anytime fixtures.  If both you and your opponent are non-Premium then the Thursday time-slot will be used, regardless of your Anytime request.
3)  Last season we had some issues with managers signing up but not showing up in my register - please ensure you click the "Display Signups"  link afterwards and ensure your team is listed.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

Good luck and maybe victory befall you.

16 Teams signed up so far - that's 2 Tiers ready to go.

New format reminds me of the vertical league structure some are so keen on. Should be some very even pools!

personally, im not sure how i feel about a league format...too similar to what we have at the moment with the....well...league system.

and if i understand it right, the leader at the end of the round robin is declared the winner? (i.e. no playoffs?). Will be pretty hard going for teams that are mediocre in their pool knowing they will be out of contention early on and are there only "to make up the numbers"....

anyway, it is always worth a go...no harm in trying....though maybe i would have suggested maybe a playoff system at the end so everyone still has a chance? (i.e. maybe the old NRL styles...4 plays 5th, loser out and the winner plays the loser of 2nd v 3rd etc...)

Fair comments Rob. Keep in mind that this comp has no energy management which is a major distinction from the league.

Like you say - give it a go, if it doesn't work, we don't do it again.

You make a good point Rob. For Div 1 managers it will be pretty much like your league - but with no energy, intensity, and Cup concerns. The best team will win and the losers won't be able to blame the Cup draw or something

But for everyone else it has the potential to be great because teams of near equal ability will be in the same league with its linear/vertical style. And will be far more equal than the leagues in Divs 2 and 3. We do however need way more sign ups to make it more even in each league.

How many more managers do we want? Looking at the API, I could send a BR mail to all NZ managers not signed up.

EVERYONE

Is there a way to only PM managers from div 3 and above? Failing that it wouldn't take too long to do manually...<30 mins.

Yeah I can do that or only email teams with a certain amount of ranking points.

If we go over 24 teams then (8 championship, 8 premiership, 8 ecc) then what do we call the leagues? Do with trophies? Do we insert say league one, league two in between the premiership and the ECC? ECC is always the bottom.

We could introduce Heartland. Or some fresh new NZ names like weta, tuatara, kakapo, etc. As for trophies we could recycle some of the ones no longer in use like Shield or Bowl design. It would be nice to make new ones but I don't know if we have anyone around here that can.

Oh yeah, good idea. Lots of stuff to mine for league names. I don't have any bright ideas on the trophies either though (we do have a full season to figure it out)

I'll spam any division 1/2/3 team not entered with a link to the clubrooms and see if they want to join. Not expecting a massive response rate but should get the numbers up a little.

Decent response to the spam I sent out this morning. When I sent it out there were 32 sign-ups but up to 45 now.

Wow, shocked to see 45 sign ups to the NZI. We are back baby!

You made the NZI great again Bren. You are pretty much the Trump.

Hoping for a few more over the next 24 hours as well. Eyeballing it, about 30% of the email managers have opened the email I sent. I'd also say about 40% of those have opened the email have gone on to sign up. If we can get it up to a 50% read rate then might be able to get it close to 56 sign-ups for 7 tiers.

Great work Bren

We should also keep the mail part of the API in mind, it could come in handy for other things. Maybe like sending a reminder to every NZ manager to scout youths in even-numbered seasons etc?

Just as a thought on seedings (just throwing the idea out there). This is a method I've always liked. I find ranking points to not be a great measure of a team for various reasons. We've got a couple of teams that have some really good players but don't have the ranking points to go along with it. (i.e. Linkin Hawk 15) since there's not many for them to pick up in division 3.

Since the aim of this is to try to have as many closely matched leagues as possible, seeding by ranking points will likely place a team like Linkin Hawk 15 too low -- making the league they're placed in a foregone conclusion.

This method combines ranking points with their top XV CSR to smooth out the irregularities of ranking points to hopefully produce better leagues.

It is
a) calculate the standard deviation and mean of ranking points
b) calculate the standard deviation and mean of Top XV CSR
c) For each team, calculate how many standard deviations their ranking points are from the mean (Team Ranking Points minus Mean Ranking Points)/(Standard Deviation)
d) Do the same as c) but for Top XV CSR.
e) For each team, take result from d) and minus the result from c) multiply that by the standard deviation of ranking points and multiply that by 0.5. Add the result to the team's current ranking points.

You can see the calculations for the current sign-ups here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lCLZc-DT2fiTv_sXcJBPucu7_UGwGtZUrknnm9kA6GA/edit?usp=sharing

That spreadsheet also shows examples of leagues created with current ranking points and leagues created with this method.

What's actually happening with the calculations is that it is comparing the relationship between ranking points and Top XV CSR. If someone has more or less ranking points than what their Top XV CSR suggests they should have then it's adjusted up or down. The 0.5 figure in the final calculation is the degree to which they get adjusted. A figure of 0 would have no impact on ranking points while a figure of 1 would just resort the list by Top XV CSR. Somewhere in the middle is about right in my opinion.

I'm not saying it's a perfect system, just something that will yield better results than simply using ranking points.

Dk about others but a team like Linkin Hawk just has to be put straight into the top league IMO.

I reckon more weighting on 1st XV CSR.

Holy shit.

Been offline basically all weekend as it was my wife's birthday, casually check the NZI signups page and see 54 teams!!

Finally make my way here and it all makes sense

Existing trophies were all made by Buccaz - is he even around any more?!

More than happy with suggestions for new tiers - even to entirely rename them if desired. Do we need to dish out 1st/2nd/3rds?

Very fair point about changing the seedings - considering how many brand new teams will be involved. Historically it wasn't a big deal because it was usually the same teams, and the odd new entrant slotted in based on rankings. Bren, we can have a go to formulate a seeding system and have a crack at it.

Bren - freaking awesome work man.

ivelostmysparky wrote:I reckon more weighting on 1st XV CSR.

If you go the spreadsheet, I've set it up so you can adjust how much 1st XV CSR is actually weighted and see how that affects the rankings. Just edit the figure in red at the top.

75% imo. No basis behind that. Just feels right.

54 teams is astounding I was hoping for 40.

We should abolish 3rd place trophies and just have winner and runner-up per tier.

Thoughts on names for leagues?

Could we switch the Premiership and Championship around?

1. Premiership
2. Championship (or we could keep the status quo)
3. __________
4. __________
5. __________
6. __________
7. ECC

My main thoughts would be name the leagues after NZ animals, classic All Blacks, or classic BR All Blacks. The Vaikona Cup?

Yeah BRNZ Legends is the way to go for those extra tiers IMO, and if there's any time to switch up my monumental fuck that was getting Championship and Premiership the wrong way around, this is it

I've flicked buccaz a PM to see if he'd be able to help with trophies - see what he says.

BR Legend options:

Players: Gair, Vaikona, Breakspear, Hand, Tazewell, Wilks, Kember...?

Managers/Clubs: Escath/Manukau Phantoms; slarty/Magratheans; Scuuba/Excelsior; buccaz/New Lynn Red Sox; SmellyStuff/whatever they were called...

Too many to think of