Ulster tops Inter-Provincial study

Is Ulster and Munster football better than Connacht and Leinster? A fellow blogger for Hoganstand website used the current national leagues as a guide.

Over the course of years there are always endless debates on the relative strength of each province against the other. In the pub you will hear talk that is always a mixture of intelligent debate and a few wind-up merchants stating their piece.

The impossibility of comparing provinces on championship results, with qualifiers and different amounts of teams participating in the four provincial competitions, means that the leagues offer us our only real concrete comparative tool and even that does not give us a truly accurate picture. But nevertheless, it is the best we have got.

For the means of this study, in the NFL we decided to give the team at the top of Division 1 - Cork - 33 points and the team at the foot of Division 4 - Kilkenny - one point. The 31 teams in between these two get score ratings from 32 all the way down to 2 based on their league position. i.e. The second team in Division 1 scores 32, the third, 31, the fourth 30, and so on down through all the divisions until we end up with Kilkenny at the foot of Division 4 with one point.

The totals are added up for each province and then divided by the number of counties that compete in provincial competition, to give us a final ranking score. Leinster football fans should probably stop reading now.

Football provincial standings

First - Ulster, 195 points, 9 counties, 21.67 score

Second - Munster, 104 points, 6 counties, 17.33 score

Third - Connacht, 95 points, 6 counties (inc London), 15.83 score

Fourth - Leinster, 167 points, 12 counties (inc Kilkenny), 13.92 score

Kilkenny were included in Leinster even though they don't compete in the Leinster SFC and even if they were taken out of the calculations, Leinster would still finish in fourth.

If London were taken out of the Connacht calculations then they would finish above Munster in the table. However, before Connacht fans start getting too excited by that news, if the final table included all the sides that are allowed to compete in their provincial SFC, New York's inclusion would see them slip below Leinster into fourth place.