Rugby’s statistical record is even sparser than soccer’s, especially in the pre-professional era. I had resigned myself to just not including rugby players, but there is a bit of hope; NZ Rugby History has New Zealand stats going back to the beginning of the NPC and the French site It’s Rugby covers the professional era.

Test rugby stats are covered fairly comprehensively, and I tossed around the idea of just using Test numbers, but even great players had only 30 or 40 matches to their credit. It’s just not enough.

So, baby steps. We’ll start putting the rugby players here, as we get them, acknowledging that we’re never going to get all of them.

The second problem is that, like soccer, we’re limited to just points and games played. Even worse, most of the scoring falls to the fly-half, so there’s a real lopsidedness to how the rankings are going to come. Even spreading around credit for team scoring leaves the No. 10’s way out in front.

All players get full credit for their tries, conversions and drop goals. Penalties are split between the kicker and the team forwards. Backs get credit for team tries, forwards for all team scoring.

Defense 1 is based on team points allowed. If data is available, the backs get credit for team tries allowed.

Here’s what we have so far:

	Games	Total	Per 160	Sqr Root	Sum		Off	Def
Dan Carter	343	50.69	23.65	7.12	30.77		38.14	9.16
Jonny Wilkinson	412	56.89	22.09	7.54	29.64		37.53	6.66
Andrew Mehrtens	294	37.18	20.23	6.10	26.33		33.29	7.18
Rob Andrew	203	24.02	18.93	4.90	23.83		28.29	9.58
Carlos Spencer	313	27.78	14.20	5.27	19.47		21.49	6.91
Jeff Wilson	187	16.05	13.73	4.01	17.74		19.77	7.70
Christian Cullen	226	17.31	12.25	4.16	16.42		17.31	7.21
Bryan Habana	344	24.63	11.46	4.96	16.42		14.52	8.39
Zinzan Brooke	249	18.55	11.92	4.31	16.23		15.10	8.73
Joost van der Westhuizen	233	16.52	11.34	4.06	15.41		14.20	8.50
Tana Umaga	324	21.64	10.69	4.65	15.34		14.18	7.19
Brian O’Driscoll	327	21.46	10.50	4.63	15.13		14.06	6.94
Jonah Lomu	184	13.16	11.44	3.63	15.07		15.62	7.27
Justin Marshall	364	22.88	10.06	4.78	14.84		12.76	7.36
Rupeni Caucaunibuca	122	8.82	11.57	2.97	15.54		16.42	6.73
John Eales	132	9.45	11.45	3.07	14.53		14.29	8.63
Scott Quinnell	248	15.32	9.88	3.91	13.80		13.42	6.52
Michael Jones	180	11.51	10.23	3.39	13.62		11.54	9.92
Sean Fitzpatrick	227	13.55	9.55	3.68	13.23		9.90	9.20