Blindsided Sports Stats

Its very much that time of year, where for those of us with a vested interest any Saturday afternoon glance at some football scores leads onto some hurried mental arithmetic as we try and work out whether the season in which we've already invested emotionally and financially will end in glory or not. As a Luton Town fan I have some 'skin in the game' again this year, and therefore for the past few weeks I've been trying to work out whether or not the Hatters are on track for a second successive year.... what follows is some of my workings. How many points do you need to get promoted in the English Football League?  We'll start by comparing the points needed for the title and promotion in each of the EFL's three divisions and see whether any division is 'easier' to win (in terms of points scored, obviously the championship is the hardest to win from a purely footballing point of view). For the sake of simplicity throughout this blog I'll refer...

The Stereotype We're probably all familiar with the stereotype of the mercurial French team who can go from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again, often within the same passage of play. That Gallic inconsistency is as much a part of watching France in the six nations as Eddie Butler's 'Hallo Hallo' accent. But are Scotland even more mercurial at the moment and thus arguably even more French? How to measure inconsistency? Measuring inconsistency is not that easy, if we want to show a eam is comparatively good (or bad) at something the stats will show them top (or bottom) when compared to their peers. In this case however we want to show them at both extremes as they go from world beaters to 15 blokes who met in the changing rooms before the game and back. Comebacks and 'Uneven Scoring' A really inconsistent team would be inconsistent within games, having one great half and one terrible half and you would expect many second half comebacks in the...