Involvement Rate: a metric for player work rate for Rugby League

This article was originally posted on Medium in November 2019

The basics of rugby league haven’t changed in over a century, it still revolves around either running the ball or tackling the player with it. If you’re on the field and not doing either of those things, then you’re often described as a passenger or labelled with the venerable “playing in a dinner suit”.

Coaches and media will often talk about how “involved” someone is or was during a game, but it’s very nebulous and never quantified or backed up with anything other than a player having “X” amount of runs and/or “Y” amount of tackles. What if we were able to quantify the amount of this “involvement” a player had?

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