NRL finals rewarding mediocrity again this season with several clubs not worthy of place The Broncos can still make the eight despite being in 13th position. IF the NRL wanted to do a comedy-drama on this year's finals series we have the title  Eight Is More Than Enough. As some Broncos fans grieve over the fact the club's finals tilt is on life support, others are asking a more pertinent question - how on earth are they still alive? It seems incongruous the Broncos are 13th on the ladder with only plodding St George and basket cases Wests Tigers and Parramatta below them and yet, with games against the Knights and Bulldogs to play, can still make the final eight. Nine wins out of 22 matches should not qualify you for anything bar a day of Monday madness in early September. Yet the most hopeful of Broncos fans still have a calculator in one hand, an NRL draw in the other, and their fingers crossed on both. You can't blame them but there should be no tears when the axe falls. Perhaps it would be better for the Broncos to miss the finals and cop the chastening fallout rather than sneaking in and salvage some sort of soft pass mark. This is a year where the top four - the Roosters, the Rabbitohs, the Storm and the Sea Eagles - look classes above the rest. The lower reaches of the top eight are the limbo land of rugby league, where teams can succeed and fail in the one season, sneaking into the finals with a win-loss rate of 50 per cent, or even less which no self-respecting premiership hope would be happy with. For all the hype and hoopla about the race for eighth place on the finals ladder, cold statistics tell us it is a shallow shootout between teams who have covered themselves in mediocrity this season. No-one who misses the eight will be unlucky. There are four teams a point ahead of Brisbane - the Titans, the Panthers, the Warriors and the Raiders - who probably don't deserve to get there either because they have not even won 50 per cent of their games. Some Canberra fans were dirty at the sacking of coach David Furner while their team was still in contention for the eight. But the fact that the Raiders have lost their last four and their for-and-against quotient is a miserable -136 says a lot about the Raiders of the lost mojo. Yet still they remain in the hunt. Imagine if the Raiders make the finals and went through to topple the top-placed Roosters whose for-and-against was a staggering +321 before Monday night's game against the Sharks. That means the points differential between the Roosters and the Raiders is a massive 457. One team is technically 114 tries better than the other. If the Raiders somehow managed to beat the Roosters the Roosters would have a right to feel as hard done by as the man who spent his life assembling a fortune only to have it picked from his pocket when he goes out to spend it. Each finals system has its merits. The 15-team Super Rugby competition has just six finalists and teams that make the finals stand proudly as high achievers. The negative of this system is that a bad month can kill your season unlike rugby league where the Cowboys won six of their first 16 and could still sneak into the finals, providing us with countless "will they or won't they" moments.