It's only bizarre if you don't understand it, and you won't understand it if you don't try and understand why the clubs that win consistently manage to do so.
Premierships are the result of being competitive and having some luck over a period of time. They aren't something that is achieved by taking a bottom ranked club (e.g. Parramatta in 2013) and inevitably building over a predefined number of years until the guaranteed grand final win magically occurs, followed by a rebuild. If there were any guarantees of this every club would be doing it, and they would all take turns going through this cycle and winning competitions. The fact of a salary cap might lull merkins into thinking this is the sort of consistently fair and level competition that we should have. But there is so much more than just the salary cap at play. Some clubs are just stronger than others, so when they peak they are (almost) guaranteed to win a premiership within a certain timeframe. Other clubs are less strong and so when they peak their 'premiership window' is smaller and their chances of winning the required three consecutive finals games is much lower. It doesn't mean they're no chance but maybe in a two to four year period they will be a 25% or 30% chance of winning a comp. They might jag a comp in that time (e.g. Sharks in 2016-18) or they might not (e.g. Raiders in 2019-20). It takes some luck. But we can tell the strong clubs by their overall win rate over a number of years.
Here's a measure of how strong each club has been over the past decade (regular season wins) compared with number of premierships:
| Club | Regular season wins | Premierships |
|---|
| Storm | 173 | 3 |
| Chooks | 146 | 3 |
| Bunnies | 144 | 1 |
| Panthers | 138 | 1 |
| Sharks | 125 | 1 |
| Seagulls | 124 | 0 |
| Broncos | 118 | 0 |
| Raiders | 118 | 0 |
| Cowboys | 115 | 1 |
| Eels | 115 | 0 |
| Bulldogs | 106 | 0 |
| Dragons | 101 | 0 |
| Warriors | 97 | 0 |
| Tigers | 92 | 0 |
| Knights | 88 | 0 |
| Titans | 88 | 0 |
Now leaving aside the fact that some of these teams haven't been equally strong across the entire ten year period (e.g. we have improved in the second half of the decade while the Dogs have declined), we can infer some probabilities from this table that we can't confirm nor deny, but at least form an evidence-based theory about how often certain clubs should expect a premiership in a ten year period based on how strong they are over that period.
The key data points that show the probabilistic nature of this are the ten year win numbers for Cronulla (1 premiership) and Manly (0 premierships). It is quite possible that a team winning ~52% of games over ten years has a 50% chance of also winning a premiership in that time. In this decade Cronulla's coin turned up heads while Manly's turned up tails. Below those two we have Parramatta, North Qld, Canberra and Brisbane, each with about 49% win rate. One in four of these teams won a comp in that time so perhaps their chance of winning during the decade was 25%. The Cowboys got lucky while the other three didn't. The six teams below them had premiership chances somewhere less than 25% (perhaps 0% in some cases) and none of them got lucky. Likewise at the top, the Storm won 73% of their games over the decade in question. Maybe they were a 99% chance of winning one, with reduced chances of two and three (and four) premierships during the decade. The three clubs between Cronulla and Melbourne all won a similar number of games (between 58% and 62%) over the ten years and each won at least one premiership. Maybe they were all 90% chance (or more) of winning at least one. Maybe they were all a 50% chance of winning two, but Souths and Penrith were both unlucky, while the Roosters with three premierships were very lucky over that decade?
The point is when you look at very small, cherry-picked data sets like week two finals wins you will be fooled by your human desire for narratives, when the reality is in the much bigger data. Here's the same table with week three finals appearances included (column four is preliminary finals per 100 regular season wins):
| Club | Reg.wins | Prelims | Prelims/100 reg.wins | Premierships |
|---|
| Storm | 173 | 8 | 4.6 | 3 |
| Chooks | 146 | 6 | 4.1 | 3 |
| Bunnies | 144 | 7 | 4.9 | 1 |
| Panthers | 138 | 3 | 2.2 | 1 |
| Sharks | 125 | 2 | 1.6 | 1 |
| Seagulls | 124 | 3 | 2.4 | 0 |
| Broncos | 118 | 2 | 1.7 | 0 |
| Raiders | 118 | 3 | 2.5 | 0 |
| Cowboys | 115 | 3 | 2.6 | 1 |
| Eels | 115 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 |
| Bulldogs | 106 | 2 | 1.9 | 0 |
| Dragons | 101 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 |
| Warriors | 97 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 |
| Tigers | 92 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 |
| Knights | 88 | 1 | 1.1 | 0 |
| Titans | 88 | 0 | 0.0 | 0 |
Here we see a few glaring outliers, specifically Parramatta, Canterbury and Newcastle. We have underachieved for converting regular season wins to preliminary finals appearances but how much has luck been a factor? We know that the smaller the sample the more it is skewed by randomness. We have played in six games where a win would have gotten us to the preliminary final and lost all of them. But three of those were against the eventual premiers, one was against the losing grand finalists that year and another one was against the Storm (one of three total). The sixth (vs Souths in 2020) was the most winnable, but we had three of four outside backs unavailable from the previous week (Sivo, Jennings, Ferguson). It's horrific luck. But even worse luck is our most recent premiership window has coincided with the emergence of some incredibly powerful opponents. Three teams won 20+ games last year. That's never happened in the NRL era. In fact most years no team wins 20 games. Since 1998 only nine teams have won 20 games (actually eight plus Penrith's win rate in the shortened 2020 season was enough to win 21 games from 24) in a season and a full third of them occurred last year, during our premiership window. And this is why, at our peak, we might not win a grand final, and still lose a bunch of players to the salary cap. The point of premiership windows is that they close whether you won a premiership or not. They don't stay open until you win, and there's no foregone conclusions. Luck is always a factor, including how strong your finals opponents are.
We played Melbourne three times in the finals between 2017 and 2020. Their finals win rate during those four years was 9 from 12 (75%), including two premierships. Their win rate for the preceding four years was only 3 from 8 (38%) with no premierships. Would've been nice to play them three times during that period, but we didn't even f**king make the finals in that time. But maybe that explains why their finals win rate was so low? Like I said, luck is always a factor. We just don't know how much. You need to look at some big data to get these insights.
