We’re exactly halfway through the season as it currently stands.

So where is Munster Rugby?

Specifically, we’re sitting in 11th in the URC with five losses, but that’s close to 12th given the Emirates Lions are two points behind us with two games in hand. As ever with the URC mosh-pit, though, that doesn’t tell the whole story. We’re one win off fourth place, with another nightmare-mode first half of the season out of the way, to put it in another, slightly less depressing, way.

The URC has quite quickly introduced the concept of “Strength of Schedule” to predict and manage the regular season. A lot of clubs in the URC – and every other elite league – use a system like this to assess how they navigate a regular season to make sure you get what you need at the end, while also making sure you manage your playing resources appropriately. It isn’t quite as mathematical as the versions used in the NFL or Major League Baseball, but you can roughly work out what constitutes a difficult run of games that requires a lot of resources and a slightly easier run.

One thing has become clear also – the URC has ramped up in difficulty in the last two seasons to a point where there are very few “easy” games.

For an Irish province, things that bump the difficulty of a schedule are as follows in order;

1. Away Interpros – Leinster being the most difficult, followed by Ulster and then Connacht
2. Home Interpros – Leinster being the most difficult, followed by Connacht and then Ulster
3. South African tour
4. Away to Glasgow outside a test window
5. South African team at home near the November test window (when both sides are without internationals) or Six Nations (when Irish teams don’t have their internationals).

Things that bring down the difficulty as a schedule are;

1. Home game against Italian opposition
2. Home games against the Dragons
3. Games against Welsh regions/Edinburgh/Benetton in or around the Six Nations or November test window
4. Away games against Zebre
5. South African sides at home at the very start of the season or near a test window where their Springboks are unavailable

These factors are then amplified by the time of the season you play these opponents, so if you’re playing a northern hemisphere club during the Six Nations, the game becomes easier because they are likely quite rotated but if you’re playing an Interpro near the end of the season the game’s importance mixed with the fact it’s a derby bumps the difficulty considerably.

Then you have individual clubs that become more or less difficult to play against depending on the time you play them. It’s more difficult to play Leinster in the first half of the regular season than it is in the second half, for example, for the simple reason that you’re more likely to play a heavily rotated version of that team without their usual level raisers due to minute-minding post-Six Nations or when Leinster are prepping for European Cup knockout games the following or preceding week.

I gave a system already in place for assessing the difficulty of these opponents – you can see it at the top of every Wally Ratings article. I rank our opposition between 1-5 on the Quality of Opposition metric which takes in the general quality of the team in question and the quality of their selection. A fully loaded Ulster side, for example, would be ranked as a four-star opponent but, due to injuries, when we played them a few weeks ago I only ranked them as a three-star opponent.

The importance of the match is also an accelerating factor in the difficulty of the fixture so, for example, a home interpro against Connacht is ranked as a four-star game, and an away game against Zebre is ranked as a three-star game. As that is context-dependent – a home game against the Ospreys in October would typically be ranked as a two-star game but I ranked it as a three-and-a-half-star game due to the loss to Zebre the week before – we’ll only deal with the listed quality of the opponent in the URC so far.

Looking at every game so far, our average opponent difficulty rating per game would average out at around a four-star rating per opponent per game, which I would rank as a very difficult start to the season.

This number is bumped by playing a fully loaded Sharks team in Durban, two incredibly strong Leinster selections pre-New Year, a very strong Stormers selection in their first home game of the season, pretty much a full-strength Lions side and the Ospreys as they were in early October.

However, if we look at the second half of the season we can see a few means to start accumulating points. We have a lot of Welsh and Scottish teams in and around the Six Nations, with an away game against Glasgow just one week after Scotland play away in France on the last game of the tournament.

It gets more difficult again in the last few rounds but, bar Connacht in Castlebar, all of our most difficult opponents are at home. A lot can change between now and then but I’ve rated the average strength of our opponents as three-star between now and then, with an average projected strength of 2.5 stars per opponent per game during the Six Nations.

This time last season, we were just three points better off on 24 points, right after losing away to Connacht in the Dexcom but with a South African tour to come. With the South African tour out of the way already, we have a chance to earn around 59 points by the end of the season – that’s 38 points between here and the end of the season.

I think 59 points should be enough for 4th place, given the relative difficulty of our opponents’ schedules, plus the South African sides taking points off each other.

If we can get relatively fit, I think it’s more than achievable with the home games we have left, even budgeting for a losing bonus point or two along the way.