Winners:
Manly with Des Hasler
Tigers with Michael Maguire.
Losers:
Penrith with Ivan Cleary
TBD:
Brisbane with Anthony Seibold
Souths with Wayne Bennett
Des and Maguire are proven winners, proven premiership winners. They have a habit of getting the best from their players.
I know he's a Manly junior, but like with Nathan, I don't get the hype over Ivan Cleary's coaching. He's been a coach (except for 2016) ever since 2006 and the only year he really ever did anything was in 2011 when he took the Warriors to the GF against Manly. He has a paltry 46.9% winning ratio across all 3 clubs he has coached at (49.4 @ NZ, 45.0 @ Penrith and 41.9 @ Tigpies). In his 12 seasons as an NRL head coach, only 5 times have his teams ever won more than they lost. The only reason Gould even went after him (and shafted Barrett in the process) was because they feared losing his son at some point after it was made public that Nathan wanted to be coached by Ivan.
Seibold is only going into his second year as a coach. Sure he got Souffs to the Finals this year, his rookie year, but they bombed out of the Finals fairly quickly, yet he and the media seem to go on like he's already won multiple premierships.
And Bennett? Yes he has runs on the board with 7 premierships, a couple in the old BRL and some Origin series wins. But lets face it, at NRL level at least, his premiership wins with the Broncos have all been when his side was loaded with at least 2/3 of the Qld Origin team (and usually half the Kangaroos test side). Peter Sharp or even Trent Barrett could have won premierships with the squads he had available. And his win with St Merge in 2010 came when Manly and Melbourne who had basically dominated the previous three years, both had issues which killed their seasons. We had long term injuries to key players (notably Snake and Wolfman, while we also had a virtual rookie halves pairing in Foz and Hodko) and Melbourne got done cheating the salary cap. As soon as both were back in business in 2011, the Dragons went back to making up the numbers. He did get the Knights to the Prelim Final in 2013, but as soon as Tinkler's money ran out, so did he, right back to Brisbane. And just to note, unlike his first stint at the Broncos, they haven't been stacked with Origin and test players this time around and other than 2015, while they've still made the Finals, they have only been making up the numbers.
