@JD-Tiger said in [Are we getting too enthusiastic?](/post/1186015) said:
I do suspect that when we start as favourites, we win less of those games than other teams who start as favourites.
Not really. In the 10-year period to 2018 we were about 10th of all teams for winning when favourites.
You also have to give it perspective about what a "favourite" is; I didn't measure the grade of favouritism, i.e. borderline favourites or massive favourites. But it stands to reason that clubs with good periods, like Storm and Roosters, will be best at winning "when favourites" because in that period they won a lot and were accordingly favourites a lot. Tigers were favourites less often, but still won ~2/3 of the games where they were favourites (vs ~48% win rate for all games).
What you are recalling is, yes, the handful of games where we had to win to make the finals, or lost to the bottom side. But bearing in mind the bottom teams normally win 5-6 matches per year, plenty of teams do lose to the last-placed side year-on-year.
Probably the only thing you could say about Tigers wrt "must win" is that we are often on the cusp of Top 8 without making it, so fans will clearly remember certain matches which COULD have been won and those matches may have made a difference to the finals charge. Again, that is one-sided thinking because all losses contribute to not playing finals footy, not just the close ones, and in fact a counter-argument can be made that more close losses is a better season than the equivalent number of beltings.
IIRC there have been 3 occasions where winning the last-round match would have guaranteed Tigers played finals, losing all 3 - Knights 2007, Raiders 2016, Sharks 2019.
