If expansion does not occur in 2018 and the comp still remains 16 teams, there has to be a change in the schedule. The current schedule has become stale and won't be winning the thousands of fans to the game that Dave Smith is hoping for in the years to come.
IMO,
- 26 rounds (24 matches per team) is too many
- interest in the delayed/2nd Friday night game has dropped off over time since its introduction in 2007, largely due to the increased presence of social media on the internet, making it an easy alternative for ppl just to look at the score in advance online if they are too half-arsed to sit through a substantially delayed broadcast of Hadley calling (also, no coincidence the ratings for the live QLD match have dropped off since Hadley replaced Voss in 2012....the people of Redneck QLD have voted with their tv remotes).
Overall coverage of Friday Night Football has come a VERY long way since Ch9 started televising it live in 2007. To think that as recently as 2006 it was not only televised on one hour delay, but there was a complete media blackout of all forms (since Ch9 wanted exclusive media coverage for it), meaning the only way you could find the live score was listening to the 8pm/9pm/10pm news updates on radio. That's right; that's just how much control the NRL gave Ch9 for so many years. All this while the folk across the ditch in NZ got to see it live. Reminds me of the 1hr Sunday evening match highlights at 6:30pm (which was about 40 something mins after ads), whereas people in AFL-dominated Western Austarlia got to see the whole match live (this was before SL-war, when RL coverage in Perth significantly dropped off and hence Ch9 shafted them to the graveyard shift).
- crowd averages haven't grown since they peaked in 2005
- Ch9's RL shows have also become stale
- City-Country Origin is past its use-by date and is no longer the genuine Origin-trial that it was back in the '90s.
- Big beef: ARL being able to dictate the rep schedule and only allow Australia to play one test this year, which is pathetic. If the incumbents are 'burned out' and don't want to play, fine....just select other players who do want to wear the Kangaroos jersey. It's completely unfair on International RL fans, who deserve far better and makes the Kangaroos jersey look like something that's come out of a Weet-Bix box. I could never imagine players like Meninga, Sterlo, Lewis etc. skipping tests because they 'felt like it'. If you want to try and dick fans around, and pick and choose whenever you want to wear the Australian jersey, you don't deserve to wear it in the first place.
Another issue that hasn't been talked about much is the radio rights. One of the best decisions the ARLC made was not giving the Continuous Call Team exclusive rights, which held back the promotion and growth of the game for at least a decade. I have barely turned the dial to 2GB now and Triple M have done a fantastic job since their role in RL dramatically increased since the start of the current radio rights deal in 2013. In fact, I'll be interested if other stations like 2UE also make a bid to broadcast games.
