Six team playoff what dreadful idea. A club halfway down the league could become champions. It’s just rewarding mediocrity, they may as well go the whole hog and have a twelve team play off, it’s not as if we haven’t done something like that before. The only difference between Elstone & Wood is Elstone is thinner.
I'm not 100% on this so I may be wrong, but there was only one package for RFL properties such as the Cup, Internationals and Lower Leagues. Sky show Cup games up to and including the QF's but don't show the Semi's or Final, which indicates that they won that package but then sub-licensed some of the contract to the BBC (first choice games, the Semi's and Final). If BBC had won the package I see no reason why Sky would have wanted to purchase 3rd and 4th choice Cup games, so it makes sense that it was the other way around and Sky won the contract then sold bits of it off to the BBC. Given that the Final has to be FTA and has been on BBC since it started on TV there must be some value in it remaining that way and so BBC offered enough to take the best bits of the Cup off Sky for a decent amount. The alternative for Sky would be keeping the contract, showing all the Cup games but then having to share the Final with a FTA broadcaster as per the rules, but one that didn't have to pay anywhere like as much money because one of them would get it by default anyway. Better to take the money from BBC and let them show the major games given that hardly anyone would watch the Final on Sky anyway.
The other option is that the RFL sold the contract on a pre-agreed basis that Sky would sub-licence the Cup and internationals to the BBC at an agreed price. This I think has happened with other sports such as the Netball World Cup, which was shown in its entirety by Sky but BBC showed the England games and the Final, and future Olympic Games will also work like this with Eurosport buying up the European rights but then sub-licensing the best bits to the BBC to fulfill the FTA obligations and probably making the IOC more money than selling them directly to organisations that will know they will get rights at the end of the day regardless.
I will never understand why they went away from the original playoff system they had, ironically the system they went back to last year, the top 5. The whole Club Call and Super 8 sagas where utterly farcical and devalued the league structure, which genius came up with the idea of allowing a team to choose who they play based on them being the highest seed rather than just having the tradition of them playing the lowest ranked side remaining. The way the administrators have messed with the sport has made it terrible to follow for people and made it look amateurish with the constant changing of structures.
No chance of that happening
I hadn't even noticed this until just now when I was looking at the announcement for 2021. Such a load of nonsense, I hate the people that run our game. And the reason they've given... we are starting later so we need to have a top 6 play off like this years! Why not just make the regular season shorter then. So we could play 27 rounds of RL over 6 months, finish top and then only get one life in the play-offs whilst the team that finishes 6th (probably on just over a 50% win ratio) can win two games and be in the GF. It's absurd, and it'll make next season an absolute joke.
They've basically used the start of the season as an excuse to expand the play-offs again but without any reward of a second life to the top 2, and have done it in the hope that some mediocre side now has a better chance of making the GF. Hull only needed to beat Wigan and they could have made it this year. Imagine that happening after a full season and the side in 6th finishing 12-15 points off top spot and then knowing they are two games from the GF. What incentive is there to finish top now other than a bit of cash. I'm fed up of this game sometimes.
[QUOTE=Gray77;808273]I hadn't even noticed this until just now when I was looking at the announcement for 2021. Such a load of nonsense, I hate the people that run our game. And the reason they've given... we are starting later so we need to have a top 6 play off like this years! Why not just make the regular season shorter then. So we could play 27 rounds of RL over 6 months, finish top and then only get one life in the play-offs whilst the team that finishes 6th (probably on just over a 50% win ratio) can win two games and be in the GF. It's absurd, and it'll make next season an absolute joke.
They've basically used the start of the season as an excuse to expand the play-offs again but without any reward of a second life to the top 2, and have done it in the hope that some mediocre side now has a better chance of making the GF. Hull only needed to beat Wigan and they could have made it this year. Imagine that happening after a full season and the side in 6th finishing 12-15 points off top spot and then knowing they are two games from the G
This is definitely wrong, the BBC are the primary rights holders and show games from the first round onwards.
Sky have been picking up the second-choice set of Challenge Cup games for quite a few cycles now because, whilst you wouldn't think it by reading some of the stuff on here, having a blank weekend without any RL to show isn't good for them.