The longest carry: who runs the ball in the NRL, and how far

Why this was worth a look

The run-metre leaderboard gets read out on every broadcast as though the number speaks for itself, and the names at the top are always the players who never leave the field. I wanted to see what was left of the list once the minutes came out of it.

699 kilometres

Across 208 completed games, NRL players ran 699,288 metres. That is a bit under 700 kilometres, or roughly Melbourne to Adelaide, which is a long way to be tackled.

536 players ran at least one metre this season and 382 played 10 games or more. Among those 382 the middle figure is 86.6 metres a game — Kelma Tuilagi of Parramatta Eels, 20 games, sits exactly there. Fifty-two players cleared 3,000 metres for the season, 12 cleared 4,000, and 1 cleared 5,000.

Phillip Sami's 5,384 metres came from about 23 runs a game at roughly nine and a half metres a run. Sami played all 80 minutes in an average game and finished 510 metres clear of Thomas Jenkins.

Doing it in half the time

The season totals belong to outside backs, who are on the field for the whole game. Plotting every player’s minutes against their metres pulls them apart from the forwards doing similar work in half the time.

The chart holds two populations. Sixty-two players averaged 78 minutes or more, and their running ranges from 45 to 224 metres a game. Another 74 averaged between 40 and 55 minutes, mostly forwards, and the top of that group still reaches 171.

Naufahu Whyte of Sydney Roosters averaged 52 minutes a game and 171.5 metres: 3.29 metres a minute, the best rate among the 382 players with 10 games or more. Jason Taumalolo of North Queensland Cowboys managed 3.25 from 46 minutes, and Thomas Mikaele 3.07 from 43. Metres a minute is not a stat the feed records; it is metres divided by minutes, and both come from the game sheet.

The one back near the top of that list is Matthew Dufty of South Sydney Rabbitohs, at 3.20 metres a minute from 59 minutes a game.

Where the metres come from

Some of the running is kick returns, and for a fullback it can be close to half of it.

William Kennedy of Cronulla Sharks ran 1,838 kick-return metres, 48.6% of everything Kennedy ran all season. Connor Tracey of Canterbury Bulldogs was next on 1,800, 45.4% of the total. Keano Kini's 1,579 kick-return metres are the third most, but only 32.5% of a much bigger pile.

A fullback’s metres and a winger’s metres are not the same stat wearing a different number. One is mostly the first carry out of trouble; the other is mostly what happens after it.

Thomas Jenkins, second on this list with 4,874 metres, finished the same season level at the top of the try-scorer race on 30 tries. The race, round by round, is its own article here.

What this cannot tell you

Run metres count distance, not what the distance was worth. A 200-metre game in a 40-point loss counts exactly the same as a 200-metre game that set up four tries, and nothing here knows whether a carry went into a set defensive line or into open grass. If the feed ever carries metres by half I would go looking for the minute in a game where a forward’s metres stop coming, because that is the number the leaderboard is standing in for.