5. The Southport School – 115.615
If the GPS competition was the NBA, this Southport side would be the ’96 Bulls in terms of the talent on the pitch.
In fact, you could almost say with the talent in this team, the rest of the GPS competition would be more like the hapless Washington Wizards who faced the Harlem Globetrotters in exhibition matches around the world. Unfortunately for the Southport ‘Globetrotters’, this schoolboy competition packs a bit more punch then anyone could have possibly expected. Southport burst out of the gates in rounds 1 and 2, annihilating GT and IGS by big margins. The bye in round 3 must have softened them up, as they were exposed by highly efficient running rugby by Nudgee in Round 4. Round 5 can’t even be explained by a mere mortal like myself; Southport blew a big halftime lead, allowing Churchie to come back in to the game and tie it up in the final minutes.
Statistically Southport has played the toughest schedule so far, with an SOS rating of 0.606. Their high power ranking is definitely boosted by this, and in combination with the largest average winning margin of 13 is titanic for a team with just 2 wins to their name. The only detractor for this Southport Power ranking is the Points in the last 3 rounds total – Southport has added just the one point to their campaign since Round 2.
If this was a speculative Power Ranking, I would say without a doubt that TSS is the equivalent of the 2012 LA Lakers. Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, and Steve Nash underperformed as a group, but the talent-stacked team are the perfect equivalent of the representative laden Southport side, who were also are struggling to convert their talented roster into dominance on the pitch after not winning a game in the last 3 rounds (with the bye, ok, but who thought anyone would be saying that this season, and only halfway in?!?).
At this point the data range becomes too limited to compare with the NBA; the number 1 ranked Oklahoma City Thunder finished the season with a 109.218 Hollinger Rating. So from this point on all my evaluations in regards to comparative teams will be speculative.
