KFC SuperCoach NRL: Have your say and settle the argument – who is the GOAT?
In an effort to settle the second biggest question in SuperCoach NRL, Rob Sutherland rates the greats and takes time to party with Carty.
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If you, like Tom Sangster and I, occasionally find yourself sitting around the campfire gnawing on some KFC and arguing about who is the greatest SuperCoach player of all time, then you’re in luck.
Not because I’m going to answer the question with a pithy two word name.
No. That’s not my style.
Rather I’m going to present a few hundred words of statistics and a few hundred more words talking about those statistics and then, informed, I’m going to ask you to vote for the greatest KFC SuperCoach player of all time.
That’s right, the ball is in your court.
But don’t wind up to whack it back just yet, first the stats … and my words …
Before we talk ‘The Greatest’ let’s talk ‘The Pantheon.’ Below I have listed the 25-best individual season totals since 2009. You’ll note a few names pop up more than once, some only once, but oh what seasons they were.
If you had any one of these players in your team that year you will remember it fondly – just ask Tom he still mists up when you mention Bryce Cartwright and 2016 in the same sentence.
THE 25 HIGHEST SINGLE SEASON SUPERCOACH SCORES
At the top of the table is Sam Burgess’s massive 2014 effort. The big Englishman missed just one game of the regular season that year averaging better than 70 MPG mostly at lock though a little prop and second row for good measure. Burgess scored 10 tries that year and he cracked triple figures an incredible seven times with a season best of 142 points. The historians among you will remember that Burgess went on to win the Clive Churchill Medal despite having his cheekbone broken in the first tackle of the game. Burgess was more than a one-year phenom of course. In 2013 he averaged 75PPG. In 2016 some thought he’d have lost a step due to spending a year playing rugby union – they were wrong. Burgess scored 1,178 points that year again at an average of 75PPG. Injuries took their toll after that, but if not for the year in union I have no doubt Burgess would have multiple entries here not just the top entry.
Now I’m betting that it has not escaped your attention that the next name on this list, Corey Parker, appears no fewer than four times, and each of those four seasons was a top-10 not ‘mere’ top-25 performance. The SuperCoach ‘God’ – and ambassador but that was NOT why I wrote this article I assure you – parlayed a superb defensive workrate, otherworldly offload ability (you’d swear he threw some of them just for the SC points at times) and goalkicking duties into being a must have every year he played.
Paul Gallen was the only man who ran Parker close back when they both played, and yet he’s here just twice. The disparity is down to Parker’s durability. Gallen was as, if not more, explosive than Parker but he was not able to play as many games as Parker due to injury – and more than the odd suspension. I won’t fatigue you with yet another table, but take my word for it. In the top-10 season averages of all time (minimum 10 games) while Parker appears three times it’s Gallen who appears four times, and that would be five times if we lowered the bar to a nine-game minimum.
If the measure of an athlete is that the code had to change the rules due to their style of play, then perhaps Nathan ‘Flop’ Hindmarsh should get your vote here. Hindmarsh was the first player in NRL history to reach 10,000 tackles and he retired having being credited with more than 12,000. Quite a lot of those tackles would be classified as flops these days, and you could make the case that the KFC SuperCoach rules were changed to recognise ‘legitimate’ tackles only as a direct result of Hindmarsh often scoring 60PPG+ in tackles alone. But you only play by the rules as they existed at the time, and Hindmarsh was good enough at doing just that to appear twice in this list.
James Tedesco appears here only two times, but he can thank the shortened 2020 season for that as he scored 1618 points at 95PPG in the 17 games he played last year. Assuming he had managed three more games then he would have finished with a top-10 score. Four more games and we would have had a new best ever. But that didn’t happen so for now we should just celebrate Teddy and Jarryd Hayne (2014 and 2009) as the only two backs to manage multiple appearances in the list. A list so dominated by forwards that backs appear just six times with Roger Tuivasa-Sheck’s magical 2015 Roosters swan song and Johnathan Thurston’s Dally M winning 2014 the only other seasons by backs to make it.
‘What about The G. O. A. T.?’ I hear you say. Well, yeah Cameron Smith went okay I guess. Better than that, in fact it is a surprise to see Smith appear just the three times here peaking as ‘low’ as 13th. Smith’s greatness is not really fairly measured on this table. Sure he scored better than 1746 just thrice. But from 2012-2019 (I’ll exclude the shortened 2020 season in which he averaged 79PPG here), Smith had a season ‘worst’ of 1,461 points and averaged 75PPG+ in five of the eight years. The Storm stalwart may have only occasionally scored the most points of any player in the season – but he was almost never outside the top-five over the longest of careers.
So there you have it, Parker, Gallen, Hindmarsh, Smith, Burgess and Tedesco. In my humble opinion the six best KFC SuperCoach players of all time. But who is the best? Tell me below.
Actually, not so fast! Let’s just take a moment to celebrate the oddbod element, the eccentrics, the names you throw in to the conversation when chatting ‘KFC SuperCoach Gods of yore’ because you’re a bit left field, a nonconformist.
Or like me, pretentious.
There’s the outlier spectacles that were Bronson Harrison (2009), Shaun ‘The Fence’ Fensom (2011) and David Stagg (2009). All three backrowers leveraged their phenomenal workrates in defence into standout seasons.
On the other hand Ryan James can thank his freakish fecundity of four pointers for his huge 2016 total. The base was good, great in fact averaging 55BPPG in 59MPG. But it was the pies that separated James from the rest that year with the big Titan crossing the stripe with ball in hand a rather incredible 12 times.
At number ten there’s Andrew Fifita, who in 2013 perfected the ‘hit it up 7 metres, stop, crab sideways fending away would be tackler after would be tackler then offload’ – a play good for 10 points a hitup if you got it right – and Fifita got it right plenty.
Which leaves, rather fittingly, the man, the myth – the enigma that is the Carty Party – to discuss. Five years ago, Bryce Cartwright went on a wondrous offload spree that has rarely been seen before, certainly never by a man available at 5/8. Starting the season at second-row there was the odd, no lets be honest, more than the odd, missed tackle. But there was also plenty of attacking flair and two triple figure scores in 12 games. Then midway through the year, Cartwright was shifted to five-eighth and the party really got started. Cartwright’s base barely dipped, while the attacking stats flowed like coins out of a Corey Norman inspired pokie machine. In 11 games Cartwright passed 100 five times. But, just like Icarus before him, Cartwright was not built for such rarefied air; his wings melted he crashed back to earth and in the seasons since he has never again attained such heights.
And so the words end, let the voting begin – let us know who you consider to be the greatest player in the hallowed history of SuperCoach NRL:
Originally published as KFC SuperCoach NRL: Have your say and settle the argument – who is the GOAT?
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