Thread by @ploehmann

#swfc have 9 matches left to complete an unlikely relegation escape.

In the thread below, a look at the historical context of what a Great Escape would look like.

The points won by teams at the bottom of this season's Championship are tracking a typical season quite closely:

In general teams at the bottom improve their form more in the last 9 matches than teams further up the table, so we shouldn't assume the helping hand of a collapse by the teams above us:

The variation is quite big, though, and the most a team in 22nd after 37 matches ever won in the final 9 matches was 18 points. The same as the typical team in 1st:

7 out of 10 teams already in the bottom 3 by matchday 37 also finished there

In 5 of the last 22 seasons the team in 23rd after 37 matches managed to survive:

Only once, however, have a team managed to bridge a gap of 6 points or more after 37 matches to ultimately survive: Barnsley last season, when they won 15 points in the last 7 to pip Charlton and Wigan to survival despite trailing by 7 at this point of the season:

Wednesday's toil in getting out of the bottom three, despite the November boost of a halving of the points deduction, is clear to see in this chart:

If we do a very simple "prediction" of the final table, and put a ruler under the current points trajectory and extend the line to 46 matches, 21st will require 47 points.

It doesn't change the standings massively if we use the form of the last 8 matches instead (46 points):

That's obviously too basic. The fixture schedule of the teams at the bottom will play a significant part too.

@FiveThirtyEight have a "Soccer Power Index" (SPI), which measures the strength of 640+ teams and which are used for simulations of the remaining matches in their model.

The SPI of a team goes up and down depending on whether they perform as expected against an opponent or not. A bit like the rating system in chess.

How does it look in this season's Championship then? The quirk is the season start rating weighs a team's @TMuk_news value too:

How, then, is the strength of opponents, measured using that SPI rating, in the remaining matches on average?

Birmingham's schedule is a tad harder than ours, while Rotherham's and Coventry's are a bit easier.

The final table in @FiveThirtyEight's model looks like this - not much change, then, but it's perhaps also a conservative model predicting close results and thus not much in it in the way of expected points from the remainder for all teams:

Here are the fixture lists for 16th-24th:

#swfc's currently on 32 points.

@FiveThirtyEight's model says 21st will finish on 49 points.

A simple projection says 46-47 points and 47-48 points if you take into account teams in 21st after 37 matches tend to win points at a higher rate in the remaining 9 matches.

Survival target: 46-49 points.

We need to win another 14-17 points.

We have 5 home games and 4 away games remaining in which to do so.

Ranked by difficulty using the @FiveThirtyEight's model we're looking at home games Bristol City, Forest, Blackburn as must wins and then another 2-3 wins/5-8 points from home games Swansea+Cardiff and away games at Derby, QPR, Boro and Watford.

Damn hard, but not impossible.

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ko-fi.com/ploehmann

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