In that year, the top four on the ladder were (in order), the Eels, Dragons, Broncos and Wests Tigers and their big following helped produce an average NRL crowd of 16,458. Coming into round 25 this year, the bottom four clubs were the Broncos, Wests Tigers, Dragons and Eels. The Broncos then won a match, meaning by the end of the home-and-away season, for the first time, four of the bottom five positions on the ladder were occupied by traditional big crowd-pullers.

In the past 10 years, the worst result has been for only one of these four to finish in the bottom four. The Bulldogs, another club that consistently has turnstiles clicking, suffered a fall of 7.2 per cent (from last year's average of 21,107 to 19,590), despite making the finals. The Roosters, whose crowds rose 54.3 per cent from 12,548 to 19,368, along with the Rabbitohs (up 17.8 per cent), could not offset the fall by the bottom four. Only five clubs registered increases - the Raiders were up 0.4 per cent and the Sharks 1.8 per cent - with the Storm (27.9 per cent) the only NRL club to achieve Rabbitohs/Roosters-like rises.

Fixed scheduling must take some responsibility for the fall. The NRL set the draw for the first 20 rounds, unlike previous years where the broadcasters scheduled matches on a five-week cycle. However, the broadcasters did have a major input into the schedule, taking the blockbusters away from the early rounds and scheduling lesser-quality matches around Origin, producing a dip from which the code did not recover. To be fair, a motive in agreeing to one Friday night match after Origin, rather than double-headers, was to limit player burnout.

There were also more blow-out games this year, with 32 games having a margin of 30 points or more, compared with 18 last year. Finals numbers offer another comparison with Labor's election results. In the past 10 years, there have been only five occasions where a Sydney week-one finals match has attracted a crowd of more than 20,000.

This is a low base, similar to the number of seats Gillard had following the 2010 election where Rudd and his leaks pitted Queensland against her. But with all four games held in Sydney's main stadiums last weekend, the crowd was 21,000 for Rabbitohs-Storm; 32,000 for the double header and 23,000 for Bulldogs-Newcastle.