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Average premiership rugby scores


Average scores in premiership rugby

What is the average score?

I've been exploring what the average score is in a premiership rugby game. The first question might even be which average? You can make a fair case for using the mean or median average score. Even the often overlooked the mode could be a useful measure in this context. 

The first chart below is simple, and shows scores in premiership games since 1997. The shape of the curve is as we would expect given a negative score is (so far) impossible in rugby is positively skewed with a long tail to the left. 



The most common score in premiership rugby over the past 25 seasons is 20 points, with 319 occurrences, ahead of 16 (294) and 19 (287).
What I like most about the graph above though is those odd little patterns. With hard (or unlikely) to score totals such as 18 which has happened 200 times, nestled between 17 (252) and 19 (287) 

The median (middle) premiership score is 21 meaning 50% of scores are 21 and above and 50% are 21 and below. 
The mean score is 22.64 which is skewed by a few very large scores 

Trend over time

Over time the pattern of mean scores (by season) is a gradual decline over the first half of premiership history (maybe due to increased professionalism?). Mean scores increase again from about 2010/11 onwards, with 2021/22 pipping 1999/2000 to the highest mean score. The margin between those two seasons was 4 fewer points over the course of the season. A single try fewer in 20/21 and it would have only been the second highest scoring on average. 
 
The improvement in scores over the past few years is equal to teams scoring 4.5 points per game more in 21/22 than they were in 15/16.




As we would expect the median score follows the same pattern, with the 2021/22 season also seeing the highest median score (24.5) recorded in a premiership season, this is just ahead of the 24 points recorded in 1998/99, 1999/2000 and 2017/18. The lowest median score was 17 points in 2009/10, which is more than a converted try less than the 2021/22 figure, while the increase in points scored in recent years is reflected in 
increase of 4.5 in median since the 2015/16 season.



Coming next a bit of a dive into the most common scores in premiership rugby.

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