Locker Room: How Anthony Griffin is building a budget NRL premiership contender
Anthony Griffin studied the past 15 NRL winners in his bid for glory – and it’s helped him put together a Dragons roster largely being paid for by his rivals. This is how he did it.
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St George Illawarra will run on to WIN Stadium in Wollongong this afternoon with more than $1 million worth of their playing roster being paid by rival clubs.
Welcome to life inside the Moneyball Dragons.
Jack Bird was supposed to be on $900,000 this season at the Broncos.
The strike centre, being quietly spoken about as a NSW State of Origin option, is still earning that same salary even though he’s now wearing the Red V.
The catch is the Dragons are paying around $400,000 of his wage, with the Broncos continuing to pay the majority of his bank balance.
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It’s the same story for the discarded Queensland duo of Andrew McCullough and Josh McGuire.
The Broncos and Cowboys are contributing to their respective salaries at Saints. In fact, the Cowboys are tipping in more for McGuire’s contract this season than what the Dragons are.
Even next year, 40 per cent of McGuire’s salary is being covered — and more importantly, will still be felt in North Queensland 2022 salary cap.
Parramatta are helping the Dragons, too.
The Eels are topping up former forward Daniel Alvaro’s salary despite him running around each week in red and white.
To relieve some salary cap pressure at the Roosters, the Tricolours kicked in $100,000 for their former prop Poasa Faamausili to take up a start at the Dragons.
As for bench forward Billy Burns, the backrower with a future who arrived at Saints from Penrith two weeks ago, his addition has cost the Dragons zilch after his a straight swap with former Dragon Eddie Blacker.
Behind the high rate of player comings and goings at the Dragons over the past six months is a spreadsheet and algorithm that GM of football Ben Haran, recruitment boss Ian Millward, CEO Ryan Webb and coach Anthony Griffin have been working off during their weekly recruitment meetings.
Griffin began to analyse the art of roster management in his formative years as a talent scout and then as a coach at the Broncos.
Ever since, Griffin has continued to study the certain characteristics, trends and key roster decisions that have produced the past 15 premiership winners.
The result is what we see today: a Dragons side on the climb up the NRL ladder.
The irony of the Dragons’ recruitment strategy is their opposition today, the Wests Tigers, are a befuddled mess.
No official in the game will say it publicly, but to win premierships, or to at least be successful, you have to know how to cheat the NRL’s $9.02 million salary cap that every club must work under.
The Dragons, though — thanks in part to a model adopted by their very own Moneyball version of Billy Beane in coach Griffin — are working under a salary cap closer to $10.02 million.
By “cheat”, we’re not talking about the old brown paper bag full of $100 notes passed to a player out the back of a McDonald’s car park. Advantage is probably a better word to use.
To gain an advantage and beat the cap, you either need a truckload of third-party sponsors, such as the Storm, Cowboys or Broncos, or you need other clubs paying for your players.
The Dragons are one of the poorer clubs and coupled with their lack of success in recent years, they are yet to rekindle the hearts, minds and deep pockets of third-party sponsors.
So this is where they have landed — by having rival clubs pay for their players.
It’s a similar model to what former Sharks coach Shane Flanagan and their current GM of football Darren Mooney used ahead of Cronulla’s rebuild into a premiership-winning roster in 2016.
Andrew Fifita, Ben Barba, Matt Prior, Gerard Beale, Jeremy Smith, Chris Heighington, Beau Ryan, Bryce Gibbs and Sam Tagataese were all paid by their former clubs during the Sharks premiership-winning window.
From years of research of past winners, Griffin has found there is a formula, which is far from complicated, with a number of key factors required to achieve a winning roster.
The roster must have at least two to three elite players in its spine (halfback, five-eighth, fullback and hooker).
● The roster must boast an above-average level of NRL experience.
● There must be several juniors, or players that your club has developed, within the line-up.
● And last of all, if you aren’t a “third-party club”, you have to find a way for rival clubs to pay for your players.
Bird’s return to his junior club was widely considered a gamble given his recent history of season-ending injuries.
The signatures of McCullough and McGuire hardly sent Dragons fans dancing down the streets of Kogarah.
Alvaro, Burns and Faamausili sent most Red V tragics searching for their names on Wikipedia.
In the 2011 sports film Moneyball, Oakland A’s general manager Peter Brand explains to Beane, the GM of the A’s, played by Brad Pitt, how to build a winning roster from undervalued talent.
“People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws: age, appearance, personality,’’ Brand says.
“I believe that there’s a championship team of 25 people that we can afford because everyone else in baseball undervalues them — like an island of misfit toys.”
Down at the Dragons it’s happening, too, where one coach’s trash, is another coach’s treasure.
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