Nufflenomics: Should I rush before I throw now?

Not many people pass the ball (at least in Season 2 – let’s see if that changes in Season 3) but for those of us that do, we often wonder whether it is better to rush before making a pass to make the pass easier. This is a simple problem, so there’s not much to talk about.

The first thing to do is to determine the difficulty of the pass before rushing and then work out how many rushes you need to do to reduce the difficulty. Remember it might be that it might still be a 6+ even after rushing. The only benefit there might be avoiding wildly inaccurate/a fumble (delete as applicable depending on the ruleset for the edition which you are playing).

 The below table shows how it changes after rushes assuming that the difficulty drops when you rush x number of squares. One thing to note is that this assumes that rushes are successful on a 2+, other rushing success rates are available.

What this shows is that (as should have been obvious) rushing when the pass is already a 2+ is a pointless thing to do and only increases the difficulty of the action.

However, making one rush to reduce the passing difficulty is always going to be beneficial, increasingly so the more difficult the pass is. The increase is 2% for a 3+ pass, stretching to 11% for a 6+ pass.

Any further rushes just increase the risk of the play and isn’t worth doing.

All of this is assuming no pass re-roll for the throw and no team re-rolls (or sure feet) for the rush. Let’s add in a Pass re-roll. Interestingly this makes it not worth rushing at the lower end.

For turning a 3+ pass into a 2+, or a 4+ pass into a 3+, the extra risk inherent in the rush actually reduces the likelihood of a successful play! It is still beneficial at the riskier end with a 5+ pass becoming 7% more likely with one rush (down from 9% without pass) and a 6+ pass becoming 15% more likely with a rush (up from 11% without pass).

Let’s consider a final option – you have a team re-roll to throw at the rush.

Here we can see a shift where two rushes will improve the situation for 5+ and 6+ passes, and 3 (if you happen to have sprint) will improve the situation for a 6+ pass!

The key takeaways from this:

-          -One rush is beneficial for all passing difficulties if you don’t have pass (or a re-roll).
  -One rush is beneficial for 5+ or 6+ if you do have pass but no team re-rolls
 -One rush is beneficial for all passing difficulties if you have both pass and a re-roll.
 -Two rushes are beneficial for 5+ or 6+ passes if you have both pass and a team re-roll.