Humphrey's proposal for a 30 round regular season would severely affect player welfare and all representative competitions. Hopefully, when the new broadcast deals are negotiated, representative and international matches could bring a lot more revenue into the game, which could be filtered back to the clubs. Another alternative is, depending on a larger TV deal, for a
new Independent Commission to compensate each club more significantly, as the English Rugby Union do with its Premiership clubs.
What if instead of extending the regular season we established a different competition leading up to the NRL season.
There is the potential to create a second competition. Instead of the current 24 round NRL, perhaps the NRL can run two separate competitions for clubs:
1) NRL - 16 regular round games, 1 bye, 3 weeks of finals. In regular rounds, each clubs plays the 15 others once, and play one club a second time. All players play all club games. If the competition expands to 18, clubs move to 3 conferences of 6 clubs, use a structure like the upcoming Super 15, still play 16 regular round games.
2) An NRL Cup. A club plays another 8 clubs a second time. Semi finals and final only. Test players don't play when Origin and tests are on, Origin players don't play when Origin is on.
So for this Cup, you'd have 1 round around the ANZAC Test, 6 rounds during Origin (2 either side of each game), 2 rounds towards the end of the NRL club rounds.
The advantage of a second competition around rep fixtures is that after a Test/Origin game, players would not have to back up immediately for their club.