I'm back again! With more useless stats!
I've made improvements (I hope) to my model for assessing the difficulty of the run-in for the top 8 clubs.
Purely based on league position, it looks like this:
Norwich----6.42------77.00
B'ford-------6.67------80.00
B'mouth----6.67-----80.00
Derby-------6.67------80.00
'Boro--------7.08------85.00
Watford-----7.17------86.00
Wolves------7.25------87.00
Ipswich------7.42-----89.00
The first figure is the average difficulty of remaining matches (out of 10, 10 being the hardest), and the second figure is total cumulative difficulty of all remaining fixtures.
Note that the absolute lowest (easiest) these figures could possibly be (as in if a team essentially had to play all lowest-ranked teams) is 4.00 & 50.00, whilst the highest (hardest) is 9.00 & 112.00.
To expand upon this, I sorted the league table firstly by home form, and secondly by away form, and assigned a 'difficulty coefficient' to each potential fixture. Hopefully, by applying this coefficient to simple league ranking, form could be somewhat factored-in.
The results of this are as follows:
B'ford------0.85----10.15
B'mouth---0.85----10.19
Watford----0.98----11.80
Norwich---0.99-----11.91
Derby------1.05-----12.58
Ipswich----1.07-----12.87
Wolves-----1.10-----13.17
'Boro-------1.18-----14.15
The first figure is, again, the average rating of difficulty of the remaining matches (this time with a maximum of 2.40, 2.40 being the hardest match possible). The second figure is total cumulative difficulty of all remaining fixtures.
Note that the absolute lowest (easiest) these figures could possibly be (as in if a team essentially had to play all the worst-performing, out of form teams) is 0.18 & 02.21, whilst the highest (hardest) is 1.98 & 23.77.
So, after factoring in 'form', it appears Brentford and Bournemouth have the 'easiest' run-ins, whereas 'Boro actually appear to have some pretty tough games to come.
Although our games look the easiest simply looking at league-ranking, the form of some of the teams we still have to play makes our task seem that little bit harder.