(Will Evans is an author and freelance journalist and will be writing rugby league for BPL in 2012.)

In the wake of the NRL's merciful return to 20 minutes of extra-time in finals matches, rational rugby league fans are again daring to dream of David Gallop and co. purging the abominable McIntyre Final Eight system.

The complicated method, devised for the AFL in the mid-1990s by historian, lawyer and mathematician Ken McIntyre OBE, was implemented by the NRL in 1999 and has been a blight on every September since.

McIntyre should be commended for his creativity in conjuring up a bewildering finals system that has plagued Australia's two foremost football codes during the past 18 seasons, but it is time the NRL ditched his algebraic wet dream.

The fundamental flaw of the McIntyre system is that for the first weekend of matches - particularly the 1 v 8 and 2 v 7 clashes - the combatants are not playing for the same rewards and consequences. While a guaranteed preliminary final berth and a week's rest is a sizeable incentive, the top two teams are safe in the knowledge that they will live to fight another day if they are upset by the lowest-ranked sides, desperate outfits fighting for their season in a sudden-death situation.

The seventh-placed team has knocked off the second-placed club four times out of 13 McIntyre system seasons, while the bottom-ranked Warriors (2008) and Eels (2009) defeated minor premiers Melbourne and St George Illawarra respectively to stay alive. As the two lowest-ranked losers from Week One are eliminated, fifth- or sixth-placed teams have been bundled out on six occasions due to results out of their control, which is the McIntyre system's other chief defect.

New Zealand and Parramatta arrived in the finals in red-hot form following a late-season charge, but the majority of eighth-placed teams finished there because of patchy form throughout the year and have routinely been hammered by the competition's most consistent side - at an average margin of almost 22 points. The quality of the finals' opening weekend would be vastly improved by a 5 v 8 sudden-death dogfight.

Perhaps anticipating the repercussions if a desperate seventh- or eighth-placed underdog produces a boilover against a dozy heavyweight, the sixth-ranked team has amazingly defeated the third-placed club in eight of the 13 McIntyre post-seasons (remarkably, by an average margin of more than 12 points). In what should theoretically be the most even contest of a McIntyre opening weekend (and in the only game where the rivals are competing for identical outcomes), fifth-placed teams have rolled the club that finished fourth on just four occasions.

My major beef with the McIntyre system as it is currently utilised is the order of the games. Team 4 vs Team 5 has been the first showdown of Week One of the finals since 1999, while 3rd v 6th is always the first Saturday game. This schedule is inherently unfair to the four teams in question, as they will not know their fate until the other two games are completed, an inequality that would rectified by simply swapping the 1 v 8 and 2 v 7 fixtures to the start of the weekend.

As it stands, the first two matches - through no fault of the teams competing - have the feel of a dead-rubber and are only important in the context of future results.

The possibility that the NRL does not want to be seen copying the AFL's ideas appears redundant - the AFL introduced the McIntyre Final Eight system in 1994 and kept it until 1999 (after using McIntyre-designed systems for four, five and six teams in the preceding 63 seasons).

In 2000, the AFL adopted a top-eight system almost identical to the one used in the Australian Rugby League premiership in 1995-96. The only difference with the AFL's current system is the Week Two winners cross over to the other side of the draw to avoid repeat match-ups - Week One losers crossed over in the 1996 ARL, while there was no crossover in 1995. Incidentally, the ARL was spared the embarrassment of preliminary final repeats of Week One encounters when the fifth- and sixth-placed teams defeated their top-four opponents in Week Two.

Gallop and the NRL have long trumpeted the McIntyre system's unpredictability as its strongest attribute.

But Week One of the finals between 1999 and 2011 has produced at least two winning margins exceeding 14 points in all but two seasons, while two thrashings of 22 points or more have been doled out in seven out of 13 opening weekends. On the other hand, in the eight matches played during the first week of the 1995-96 finals, the average winning margin was just five points and no team won by more than ten points - a glowing advertisement for pairing up evenly-matched opponents in Week One.

In 1995, the sixth-ranked Bulldogs stormed to an unlikely premiership triumph, while the following season St George rallied from a seventh-place regular season finish to the grand final. That's unpredictable enough for the average fan, I think.

Over to you Mr Gallop: scrap the McIntyre system before we end up in the ludicrous situation of two top-four teams eliminated on the first weekend of September.