Super Rugby season gets off to a thrilling start while Six Nations fizzles.

ANALYSIS: One of the great things about rugby is you can argue until the cows come home about who is better than whom, whether talent trumps mental tenacity, or if a grinding hooker like Keven Mealamu is more use than a free-roamer such Dane Coles.

If you think Sonny Bill Williams is superior to Ma'a Nonu and the Chiefs are better than the Hurricanes, even after they've been smashed by them and Nonu has scored a hat-trick, you're allowed - you're loyal, not mad.

But there comes a point where you have to face up to facts, and those facts show Super Rugby is as exciting as Piha Beach in full surf rage, whereas the Six Nations is akin to mangrove-riddled mudflats with the tide out and a 2km wade to reach salt water above the ankles.

MICHAEL BRADLEY/GETTY IMAGES Aaron Cruden has already offloaded more times than every first-five in the Six Nations combined this season.

When southerners New Zealand, Australia, Argentina and South Africa sealed all four slots in the World Cup semifinals, rugby fans thought that might switch a light on in the northern hemisphere.

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DAN MULLAN/GETTY IMAGES Dejected Ireland players walk off the pitch following their Six Nations match defeat to France.

Under that switch the notation "turn this on for running rugby" appears to have gone unread, with the switch untouched, even by Flash Eddie Jones, the newly-appointed England coach.

Working from the premise sport is about entertainment, there's no doubting Super Rugby is better.

Chris Symes Hurricanes player first-five Beauden Barrett.

Ok, so a one-point win is thrilling. What game would you rather see then: France 10, Ireland 9 with one try, or Jaguares 34, Cheetahs 33 with eight?

Northern Hemisphere rugby fans would lower their warm pints to point out the 28 clean breaks and 73 missed tackles in the Cheetahs game, then shake their heads about appalling defence.

Super Rugby supporters would argue gaps are bound to open, and players tire, when the game is played at a higher pace, with attacks using more tricks and sleight of hand to get runners into wide open spaces.

Peter Cziborra John Hardie goes through to score for Scotland.

In the entire Six Nations this season the No 10s have offloaded ONCE. Chiefs pivot Aaron Cruden topped that in one game, against the relatively tight Crusaders' defence.

In one round of Super Rugby, the shot-calling No 10s offloaded the ball 11 times. They chose to run or pass 80.9 per cent of the time, compared to 67 per cent in the Six Nations.

Up north, there has been an average of nearly 64 kicks a game while Down Under the boot went to ball 38 times on average, less than once every two minutes.

The Jaguares over Argentina made a thrilling start to life in Super Rugby against the Cheetahs.

So if you like tackles, trench-warfare style attack, rucks, kicks and players passing the ball around with no apparent gain of territory then, Ladies and Gentlemen, we present to you the Six Nations.

If offloads, long runs, line breaks, tries and backlines set alight by a first-five whose first thought is attack, not putting up a kick, then you'd probably prefer Super Rugby.

To be fair to those who invented the game, the weather in the Six Nations is not so much tailored to running rugby, and the need to win is much greater, it's a short season with little time to recover from disaster.

You choose.

THE NUMBERS

Stuff data journalist Andy Fyers took a closer look at the numbers after nine games in each competition, here's what he found:

TRIES GALORE

There were 53 tries scored in the opening round of Super Rugby, at an average of 5.9 per game, compared with 30 at an average of 3.3 per game in the first nine games of Six Nations.

That means if you watched every game of Super Rugby last weekend you saw a try run in every 13 minutes and 20 seconds on average.

However, a fan who sat through all nine Six Nations games so far was waiting more like 24 minutes and 15 seconds between tries.

As a result, in Super Rugby tries (not counting conversions) accounted for 58 per cent of all points scored in the opening round of Super Rugby compared with 45 per cent in Six Nations.

THE PLAYMAKERS

We looked just at how the pivots in each competition used the ball.

Super Rugby first-fives appear to be more adventurous than their northern hemisphere counterparts, choosing to run or pass four out of every five possessions. In the Six Nations games that figure was more like three out of five.

In Super Rugby this penchant to run more often produced four tries and five try assists, compared with two tries and three assists in Six Nations.

However, perhaps the most telling statistic is total offloads. There were 11 by first five-eighths in the opening round of Super Rugby but just one in the first nine games of Six Nations - produced by Italy's Jules Plisson against France in the opening round.

To put that in perspective, Tusi Pisi of the Sunwolves, Aaron Cruden of the Chiefs and Fred Zeilinga of the Cheetahs all came up with twice as many offloads on their own in the opening round of Super Rugby than all the first-fives in the opening nine games of the Six Nations combined.

BETTER ATTACK OR WORSE DEFENCE

Players in Super Rugby games ran for 858 metres in the opening round, compared with 699 in Six Nations, produced almost twice as many offloads (20.7 to 11.1), seven more clean breaks (16.9 to 10.2) and beat nine more tacklers (39.3 to 30.6).

Of course a defender beaten is also a tackle missed. So is it a case of better defence up north? Or worse attack? More likely it's a combination of the two, with the weather and the higher stakes of the game thrown in as factors also.