I convinced myself I wouldn't get involved in this again but here it goes. First of all its like debating / discussing with a marshmallow, I've no idea why, just the first thing that comes into my head, now I will try to be a bit more serious.
Ignore the title of the thread, there are little to no stats in here (google what a stat is, how it differs from a fact etc).
There are essentially two points that should be separated but are being combined and confusing everyone as they don't fully complement each other...
First... The league table at the end of the season.... yes we are more likely to have taken more points from the teams in the bottom half than the top (ignore where we finish, just split the league in 2). Its stating the obvious and hardly a mathematical insight.
Second... using where teams finish at the end of the season is an extremely poor way of judging how hard or easy the next game is, more so at this point of the season. It doesn't factor in form at the time of the game, injuries or even if a club had a new manager, has made a signing or sold a player.
The easiest example of this is one I have used before. When we played P*sh I don't think many will disagree that we were poor and an 'easy' game for them. IF we continue to play how we hope an even just scrape into the top half on goal difference, according to Cobbler78, and he confirmed this on a previous post, we would automatically become a 'hard' game based on the finish position and not at the time of the game.
As the season develops, especially post January you can use this idea more as there will be less movement of manager, no more player movements and the top 10 and bottom 10 will be fairly fixed with just some movement between the top and bottom half of the league.
Given all of that it doesn't allow for the bottom teams fighting for their lives at the back of the season, how many points did we take from top teams when we just survived under Wilder when he first came in?
on the 'facts' used by cobbler78 we should all be able to retrospectively go back and bet on all the games, safe in the knowledge at the end of the season we will know which the tough games were, and which the easy ones were.
unless, in the example above, which points a flaw in the whole ludicrous imaginary system used by cobbler 78, boro finish in the bottom half of the table, and therefore constitute an easy game, despite the fact at the time, we were by far and away the worst team in the league and were absolute fodder for them.
