You're picking a sample size which is overly affected by a single result. So you have us down as the "worst" team in a particular season because we got 7 points as opposed to 8 (getting 7 or 8 points from four games is neither great nor awful). In the original statistics that I posted, I picked the bottom six as opposed to four, it gets far less skewed by a single anomaly. You could pick the bottom eight if you wanted to be truly comprehensive about it, ie the bottom third of the division. From a purely statistical point of view, if you knew nothing about football, then that is the kind of sample size you would select. It means you have a broad enough base to work from as to eliminate randomly out of kilter individual results that owe nothing to rhyme nor reason, and would also dilute the influence of any absolutely rank awful team who finished miles adrift of everyone and got beaten every single week, while still ensuring that you were selecting teams that a top half team "should" fare well against.
Also for seasons where we finished for example, 8th, you should be comparing our record with the three teams directly above and below us, not teams who finished absolutely legions in front of us because it's a pointless comparison. In any case, and at the risk of repeating myself, it is far more valuable to compare Wolves' record against the bottom teams with Wolves' own form against everyone else, rather than data taken from other teams which bears no reflection on what issues we may or may not have.
An additional problem you have is that the method you've chosen tells us nothing about the relative strength or weakness of the division - for example last year was a league where almost all of the teams were extremely closely matched and everyone tended to beat everyone (eg us beating Hull under Saunders, Peterborough doing the double over Cardiff), with the points spread between say, 7th and 21st being far narrower than normal. In 2008/9 all of us, Reading and Birmingham were averaging two points a game or better in the first half of the season and the gap between top and bottom at that stage was massive in comparison. This really has to be factored in somewhere if you want any meaningful results. I can tell you for a fact that the division was much stronger at the top in 2006/7 than it was in 2007/8, for example.
Irrespective of which have you not shown that our record since 2006 - including this season, but discounting the PL years and last season's aberration - is actually rather good? So essentially it's only Wolves teams from the increasingly more distant annals of history are the ones that vaguely support your theory. And at a push all you're showing is that we have a record that is neither massively better nor massively worse than you would expect from a mostly middling, mostly flattering to deceive team. I've never claimed our record to be anything other than that, it's the fallacy that we constantly slip up in these games that is wrong. You would expect to get much more than three defeats out of 28 if your hypothesis were correct. In fact your original assertion is based on the assumption that an away win has a probability of 25% - Wolves aren't even losing 12.5% of their games against the bottom four. So even if you said it is twice as unlikely that an away win will happen for the bottom four (which is very, very sketchy ground), we're still doing better than "par". And as Penk and Johnny have said, ALL of this discounts form which is perhaps the most important aspect when predicting the likelihood of a result! There are just so many variables that unless you have something truly startling - if, for example, we had lost a dozen of those 28 games - you're deciding what your conclusion is and then picking facts to suit it rather than the other way round.
While I appreciate the effort you've gone to, sadly there's little evidence to back up what you're saying. It really is just one of those fatalistic football fan things. I guarantee you that the next time an ex-player scores against us someone will pipe up with how it was "bound to happen". Of course Marlon Harewood, Mark Connolly, Dan Jones, Darren Ward, Ashley Hemmings, Neill Collins and Matt Hill have all appeared against Wolves this season in the league and have registered a grand total of 0 goals. It doesn't happen all that often in reality. It does happen periodically because the churn of players between clubs is absolutely huge. Just in pure probability terms, if you bring in on average eight players a season and ship out eight players a season, and sign another four on a temporary basis who you later send back to their parent club, and the majority of those players continue to play at a similar level to Wolves for the bulk of their career (they will), it is an inevitability that from time to time a former player will score against you, just because there will be a lot of fixtures played where the opposition happens to own at least one player that you used to own. As you can see there, we have played nine league games and thus far seven former players have appeared against us. And this is when we've dropped down to a level where we haven't played in 25 years. It's not fate, it's basic probability.
Apologies for the long post - this is the kind of thing I spend hours on end analysing though.
