**With the United Rugby Championship approaching the business end of the campaign, URC StatMaster has been busy forecasting which eight teams will contest the play-offs come the end of the season.** Using StatMaster’s player data, combined with projections of likely playing squads for each game of the 2021/22 term, the URC season simulator suggests a possible outcome for each game using the same machine learning model URC StatMaster will be using to project the likely winner of each game during the campaign. At the end of each simulated season, we record the results - who wins their shield or the championship, makes the play-offs and where each team lands in the final standings. The process is repeated 5,000 times to give the probabilities of each outcome. The full methodology can be read at the bottom of this article. Ahead of the South African teams' trip to Europe this weekend, we’ve taken a look at which eight teams the simulator has predicted will make the play-offs.
