Just been doing a cheeky bit of statage on a Sunday afternoon to try and get a look at measuring the Auckland killdozer performance over the season.
A big part of the Blues power game under Cotter has been the big improvement in the carry-clean. The most relevant (and accessible) metric for the carry side seems to be the post-contact metres per carry (PCM-C) which is just: total post-contact metres / total number of carries. Table below collates this info for all Blues games this season.
The normalised values are mean-centred. This transforms the corresponding PCM-C numbers into a relative measure of performance where the mean is 0 and the distance from 0 indicating the magnitude and direction of deviation from the season mean. Significant variation is measured at steps of +/- 1 standard deviations from the mean. So the Blues +1.01 against Moana (3.16 PCM-C) and -1.00 against the Waratahs (1.75 PCM-C) means they were significantly above and below the Blues season average (2.45 PCM-C), respectively.
The data is sourced from RugbyPass. idk how accurate their stats are, or where they're originally from, but I'm assuming they're consistent at the least.
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The Blues power game took off against the Crusaders in Auckland with the first month of competition being a pretty muddled effort. As such, I'm going to focus on the post-Waratah matches because that's when the killdozer was fully armed and operational.
There were only four matches where the Blues PCM-C was significantly below average (basically <2 PCM-C), with three of those matches being within the first month of competition. The outlier is the Crusaders in Christchurch who absolutely put the breaks on the Blues carrying, forcing them to <1 PCM-C (!) and would be the only team able to claim they properly stopped the Auckland killdozer. The Blues were similarly brick-walling the Crusaders, which aligns with my recollection of that being a properly rugged encounter, to say the least.
Theoretically the Chiefs put in the second best effort at slowing down the fully armed and operational Auckland killdozer which could be heartening for the final. But even then, it wasn't a significant slow down and the Blues were still >2 PCM-C. I don't see them topping the Crusaders effort, but they'll likely have to work very hard to force the Blues to <2 PMC-C, which could be difficult given their SF injuries and any potential fatigue.
As this is an Australian rugger bugger site, the defensive efforts of the Reds and Brumbies (x2) - who I assume will make up most of the Wallabies forwards - may concern Schmidt and fixing it will probably be high on Fischer's to-do list. The Brumbies did well to stick in the SF and turn the second half into a messy scrap because the Blues carry was mincing them once they got going. Conversely, the Reds (and Rebels) put in good carry efforts against the Blues, forcing them to concede an extra half metre than average.
For the All Blacks, the Highlanders are a collective write-off, and the Hurricanes and Chiefs at least managed to hold the Blues below their PCM-C average, if not significantly so. The most pleasing aspect is clearly the Crusaders brick-wall effort with their full front-row compliment.
This is only one dimension of a complex sport - indeed, only measuring one half of the carry-clean system - and only for games played by one team. Ultimately it's a limited sample and, at the least, you'd also want to have competition wide values to draw more interesting/robust insights/patterns from. But I cbf collating all that info on a Sunday. Maybe during the work week.
