The Newcastle Knights may be one of the most deserved wooden spoon sides in the competition's history.
The season they put together was simply that bad.
Their attack looked at times as if it had been designed by someone who had never watched rugby league before, and while they fought harder than some of the teams ahead of them defensively, that does very little in the way of winning footy games if you can't score points.
Ultimately, the bubble of Kalyn Ponga's form that had saved them in recent seasons wasn't up to the mark in 2025, and while he did have some injury issues, it's hardly an excuse.
Another revolving door in the halves, the inability of the forwards to pack a punch, and a team that at times looked as if they didn't want to be there means the wooden spoon always looked a possibility.
Adam O'Brien departed at the end of the season, and with frankly good reason. Justin Holbrook has been named as his replacement and has a monumental challenge ahead of him in the Hunter.
Zero Tackle will unpack every team's season in the coming weeks, looking at the six talking points that defined the campaign and will shape the questions heading into the next one.
Today, the Knights.
Has there ever been a more deserved wooden spoon side?
Seriously, no.
For a long time, it seemed the Knights would avoid the wooden spoon, but calling the 2025 campaign for the Hunter-based outfit anything other than a disaster would be far too polite.
It's not that the playing group didn't put the effort in early in the season - at one point, their defence was the only thing remotely keeping them in games.
But their attack looked awful for much of the year, and they wound up scoring just 338 points across their 24 games.
That's just 14 points per game. You are not going to win many games of footy with that sort of strike rate in getting across the tryline.
That's the way it proved for the Knights, with just six wins throughout the course of the year.
Their defence falling apart at the end of the year was ultimately what cost them any chance of avoiding the wooden spoon. The 66 points they conceded against the Eels in the last round will be remembered, but leading into that, they let in 40 against the Sharks, 46 against the Broncos, 38 against the Cowboys and 48 against the Panthers.
That's 47.6 points per game conceded over the final five rounds.
It's hard to remember a team that deserved to be plastered to the bottom of the ladder more than the Knights of 2025.
Can Dylan Brown's arrival fix the revolving halves door?
Knights fans will point to the arrival of Dylan Brown as the club's attempt to solve their attacking struggles.
They had to pay through the nose, and commit the world to the Eels five-eighth to get him to sign on, though, with Brown to link up with the club on a decade-long deal worth around one and a half million dollars per year.
It's a figure we have never seen before, and a length of contract that is rarely offered
But the Knights had to do something.
His arrival will certainly mean one of the halves spots are locked in. Let's get it clear. Brown is not going to play reserve grade, ever, on his wage.
Whether Brown plays the six or seven remains to be seen, and who partners him is also up in the air, but Holbrook's first challenge must be to work out his best halves, and stick with them.
Adam O'Brien's biggest issue in the last 24 months has been chopping and changing his halves at the click of his fingers.
Injuries happen, sure, but he had almost as many combinations as there were games at times. That is not good for continuity or combinations, and it showed in the Knights' diabolical attack.
Alarm bells should have been ringing by Round 7, but nothing changed
The warning signs in attack were there very, very early for the Knights.
They started with a pair of wins, sure - an unconvincing 10-8 scrap over the Tigers, and a 26-12 one over the Dolphins, who at that stage were still figuring out who they were in their first season without Wayne Bennett.
But then they lost 26-6 against the Titans, 20-0 against the Bulldogs, 20-4 in the return leg against the Tigers, and 34-14 against the Sharks, with two of their tries coming in the final ten minutes.
Take out those two tries (one converted), and the Knights had scored just 14 points in about 310 minutes of footy.
The scariest part was that, even after that, nothing changed. The Knights continued to work to the same structures, the same pass the ball to Kalyn Ponga and hope, and the same level of risk.
It's as if the lights were on, but no one was home when it came to attack coaching.
How much did Kalyn Ponga's injuries impact the season?
There is little to no doubt that Kalyn Ponga being injured hurt the Knights, but not to the level some are claiming.
The issue with the Knights over the last couple of years is that their struggles in attack this year were largely predictable.
Far too much of their game is centred around Ponga. Pass him the ball and see what happens, has more or less seemed to be Plan A.
That, frankly, is never going to get you anywhere as an elite rugby league team, but it didn't stop the Knights from doing that whenever he was fit.
Ultimately, he was fit for only a tick over half of the season, and even when he was, teams seemed to have figured out the Queensland-level fullback.
His impact was nowhere near its usual, consistent self, and the Knights paid for it with just six wins throughout the course of the campaign.
Were there any positives?
Finding positives out of the disastrous campaign won't be a straightforward task when Justin Holbrook and the playing group look to complete any reviews. However, there were some early in the season.
The fact is, the Knights' defence actually started fairly strongly.
They won their first two games and kept the Dolphins, who became the NRL's best attacking side, to just 12 points in Round 2.
They spent most of the game in Round 5 against the Bulldogs on the back foot and conceded just 20 points, so the effort was there at times.
Their Round 12 win against the Penrith Panthers in Bathurst, too, as well as a Round 14 win over the Manly Sea Eagles, will be bright spots.
Fletcher Sharpe's emergence is another that the Knights can hang their hat on and look to build on, and there is little doubt that his scary injury in Perth, which ended his season, upset any chance of the club making a run home.
Are Newcastle any chance of making the top eight in 2026?
Realistically, the turnaround for this club is going to be longer than a 12-month effort.
The Newcastle-based outfit are a long, long way from being competitive based on what they produced throughout the 2025 campaign.
Dylan Brown's arrival, as highlighted above, is going to go one of two ways, and there won't be much in between.
They also have an excellent crop of juniors on the way through, but in realistic terms, they may be a year or two away from being able to make a meaningful impact.
Still, you'd expect the Knights to be more competitive in 2026 under a new coach and with new systems.
You can never write off a team with Kalyn Ponga and Dylan Brown in it, but there is no controlling interest at halfback, and the forwards are still understrength.
It'd be a hard sell at this stage to convince anyone the Hunter-based outfit will be finals-bound in 2026, but you'd think by the end of Justin Holbrook's contract in three years' time they should be if they do things right, particularly with the fact they are removing plenty of deadwood off the salary cap at the end of 2025.
