Stevenage were not just 'ropey old shite' at the beginning of the season who were only at the top because of some astonishingly fortunate run of games against teams at the bottom.
They played and beat Walsall, Yeovil, Franchise and Leyton Orient in that period (all top teams according to a system that ranks by final league position) and also played and drew against Doncaster, Bournemouth and Tranmere to get to 2nd place in the first half of the season, before a terrible collapse in form in the second half when they lost to the likes of Bury, Carlisle, Scunthorpe, Oldham and Colchester (some of the poorest teams according to a system that ranks by final league position).
Bournemouth, Yeovil, Walsall, and Leyton Orient meanwhile really were 'ropey old shite' at the bottom of the table when we played them first time around but by diametrical contrast all had a drastic turnaround in form for the second time we played them and ended up finishing near the top.
Saying that beating those teams in the first part of the season is commensurate to beating them in the second half of the season based on a blind reading of their end league position is not just an oversimplification of the reality of how good or bad those teams were at different points in the season but a logical fallacy that makes for a very unfair comparison.
In fact it would be making almost exactly the same logical fallacy that trying to make a blind comparison between the PPG of Di Canio and Kmac without considering the extraneous circumstances of the resources they had available would be making: assuming that two teams in two different times and places were of equal ability and skill.
You need to pick a line of argument and stick to it. You can't in the same post argue that Stevenage were a good side early in the season because they beat Orient, Yeovil, MK and Walsall, and then a paragraph later argue that Yeovil, Orient and Walsall were all shit early in the season.
I'm not attempting to argue that teams don't have changes in form over the course of the season, and that there are times to play them when they represent more of a challenge. I just have no idea how you would factor that into any sort of a comparison of performance. Because league position alone, when you're comparing early season with late season form just isn't a good measure.
The only way I can tell how good a side is is by seeing them play a few times against a range of opposition, or by looking at a league table at the end of a season.
