Because statistics interest some people..
Adam84, I wasn't being facetious, I was genuinely asking why. Why was that list of numbers actually interesting because Roberts Rugby just posted it with the word 'interesting' so I was curious what it was specifically that 'he' found interesting.
I believe this will have more relevance at the end of the season, and if the mean age captures only the squad of 25.
Interesting that the Waratahs have more career games and will potentially be wooden spooners, although sit along side the likes of the Crusaders in terms of average age.
The Reds with the youngest squad now may prove to be the Super Rugby premiers in 4 years.
I'm not sure that it will show much beyond a novel data point without some real analysis and context. What some of the numbers even mean in that table is not particularly clear.
The Waratahs for example have so many Super Rugby caps tied up in a handful of players (Beale alone is like ~13% of that Waratahs number if "Career Games" means Super Rugby caps? he has around ~140 Super Rugby caps from memory, Hooper is pretty similar I believe) so in aggregate they look similar to some other teams but in reality would be so different. My gut feeling is that the better Kiwi teams have a better spread of age and experience across their whole playing group.
Then there is the question of how meaningful the number of 'Career Games' is if it is just the number of Super Rugby caps without considering all the other avenues of experience. JOC (James O'Connor) would have a lot more Super Rugby caps if he'd stayed in Australia so that number probably doesn't really capture the playing groups experience at a certain tier if they've played abroad. You'd also have to consider the total number of playing minutes to know how meaningful that metric is in terms of a reflection of experience at a certain level/standard.
Should the Red's in particular be successful this season with a average age lower than historic average team ages then yes I guess that might be interesting, though with the general average age of Super Rugby squads tending to trend down in recent years I don't find it as surprising as some might make it out to be. I tend to subscribe more to the notion of cohesion being more meaningful, like Ben Darwin's theory/metrics. I would suspect that the Reds would be rather high having had a core group together for a number of years across a range of formats and competitions.