The raw data that proves Super Rugby Pacific is currently a cut above

Why is Super Rugby Pacific so exciting this season?

There is a positive mood surrounding Super Rugby Pacific.

Attendances are up 34%, viewership figures are on the rise as well (+12% in New Zealand, +17% in Australia, and +41% in Fiji), and there is no doubt that the 2025 season has been very exciting to date.

But why have the first seven rounds of the competition been so exciting?

It is true that winning margins have reduced, but that is only part of the story.

There is more to the drama we have been enjoying.

To appreciate how unique the 2025 Super Rugby Pacific season has been, we need to look at other seasons and other competitions.

As a Data Science academic, I like to work with data to understand various systems, and in my role with the Queensland Reds, I have the opportunity to look at rugby even more closely than I normally would as a fan. Let’s go on a data adventure together and look at Super Rugby Pacific (SRP), the Top 14 and the United Rugby Championship (URC) over the last three years.

The seasons run on different calendars, so we will call 2024/25 the current season (because they all finish in 2025, irrespective of when they start). 2023/24 is last year, and 2022/23 is the year before.

There are several metrics that make the current Super Rugby Pacific season remarkable.

Winning margins

For all three seasons, the average winning margin in the Top14 is about 13 points. In all seasons, the median margin (meaning half the games have a larger margin and half the games have a smaller one) is between 8.5 and 10 points.

In the URC, the average margin is roughly 11 to 15 points, and the median margin is 7.5 to 14 points.

The previous two SRP seasons were characterised by larger margins: average margin of 16 points, and median margin of 13 points.

This season, however, is very different. Super Rugby Pacific went from having the largest margins to having the lowest: average margin is just above 11 points and half of the game are decided by 7 points or less.

The trend is still there if we specifically look at margins within 3 points or within 7 points.

They are useful thresholds, because they represent games where a penalty or a try at the death could have changed the outcome.

While you typically expect somewhere between 15% and 20% of games to finish within 3 points, this climbs to 23.5% for the current Super Rugby Pacific season (and 33% for the current URC season).

And instead of 32% of games decided by less than a converted try in previous Super Rugby Pacific games, it now happens half the time (50%), which is the highest across the three leagues.

Crucially, we also see a lack of complete blowouts. Only two games have finished with a margin is 25 points or more (just under 6% of the games played so far), when it happened 20% to 28% of the time in previous SRP seasons and still happens about 14% of the time in the URC and Top14.

Lead changes

Of course, a tight margin is not always enough to create drama. Imagine a team leading by 12 points for most of the second half, and conceding a try on the last play. The final margin is within 7 points, but the end of the game was not necessarily very engaging.

Instead, we can look at how many times the lead is changing. The current Super Rugby Pacific season has the highest number of changes on average. Remarkably, in all competitions and all seasons, the median number of lead changes is 3. The only exception is the current Super Rugby Pacific season, where half the games have at least 4 lead changes.

This certainly creates drama.

We can also look at the number of times where a team takes the lead, and keeps it all the way to the final whistle.

While we see such games 27% to 39% of the time in general, it only happened 5 times out of 34 Super Rugby Pacific games this season (14.7%).

No lead is safe

With so many lead changes, being in front is not enough to guarantee a positive outcome. In fact, even being a couple of scores ahead is not sufficient.

For close to one in every five games with a reversed lead (17.7%), the losing team had been at least 10 points in front at some point in the game. It is the second highest value across the 9 seasons considered, and almost double the frequency at which it happens in the Top14.

Last-minute victories

Lead changes create drama, but this year, they also happen particularly late in the game. We can look at the number of lead changes after the break, or in the last 10 minutes, or even in the last 5 minutes. Across all categories, the current Super Rugby Pacific season stands out.

The majority of the games (almost 60%) have at least one lead change in the second half. It does not mean that the team leading at the break lost the game (as there could have been two lead changes in the second half, for instance) but it shows that, at the very least, it was not plain sailing.

All other leagues and seasons are at least 10 percentage points lower.

These lead changes can also happen very late. Almost a third of Super Rugby Pacific games this season have had a lead change beyond the 70-minute mark (32.4%), and close to one in five (17.7%) changed lead after 75 minutes.

On average, just about one SRP game every weekend has been decided in the last five minutes! Apart from the current URC season (17.9%), this is usually closer to 10%.

Surprises everywhere

Whether Gary Lineker was right in saying that “Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win”, it highlights that, in any sport, if the same teams always tend to win, it can reduce engagement.

Uncertainty is perhaps the most striking feature of the current Super Rugby Pacific season.

Looking at the other leagues and seasons, we would normally expect a third of the games to have a reversed outcome compared to the same game in the previous season: 31% to 39%, with only the current URC season slightly higher at 44%.

The script is completely flipped for Super Rugby Pacific. Across the first seven rounds, the majority of games are reversed! Close to 60% of games are won by the team that lost the corresponding fixture last year.

Of course, Super Rugby Pacific does not currently use a complete home-and-away round robin format, so some fixtures have opposite home and away teams compared to the previous season. For instance, the Reds travelled to Dunedin in round 6 to play the Highlanders, but hosted them in Brisbane last season.

However, this does not explain the high number of reversed outcomes, for two reasons:

• The format is not new, and previous seasons have similar patterns to other leagues.
• If we split between games that are exact repeats of last season and games that have opposite home and away teams, both still have a majority of reversed outcomes: 57% and 64%, respectively.

There is something genuinely unique about the current SRP season.

More of the same please!

More points, more lead changes, more last-minute reversals, and more unexpected results. No wonder Super Rugby Pacific has felt so exciting!

And the best part is that the season is far from over.