Stats expert, Naked Football Show contributor and new TWTD columnist Chris Rand says claims that Town's play-off campaign faltered after making January's signings are well wide of the mark.
I'd like to lay to rest the argument that "we threw away the season by messing around with the squad with the new signings in January". In fact, we were very consistent in 2007/08. If you look at any consecutive six matches in the season, we never averaged more than two points per game, or less than one. This is represented on a graph by what's called a ‘moving average', and you can see our six-match moving average for the season here: http://www.chrisrand.com/twtd/moving-average.html
Our worst sequence turns out to be the six or seven matches finishing with the home draw against Plymouth on 29 January. Alan Quinn played in that last game (and only that one), but none of the other three January signings (Bywater, Norris and Sumulikoski) featured until the next match, which also happened to be our first away win of the season at Sheffield Wednesday. So it could be argued that the new signings rescued a season which had reached a low point - they certainly didn't precipitate a demise, as one or two people have argued incorrectly.
Our average points per game, in what might be called the first third of the season (to the start of December), was a respectable 1.65, and in the last third (from February to the end) it was 1.59. These runs, translated to a whole season, would have got us 76 and 73 points respectively. But in the middle, December and January saw a less impressive 1.16 points per game, which is a rate of just 54 points in 46 matches.
Going back to my initial analysis of it being a very consistent season, however, note that even if we could have continued the form we showed to the start of December, the 76 point total we would have reached still wouldn't have got us automatic promotion. Only for a couple of brief moments (in October and November) did we put together a six-match run which averaged more than the 1.72 points per game which Stoke achieved across the whole season. Quite simply, we were consistently not good enough.