Both this season and last, there’s been lots of focus on whether we’d make the playoffs. Whether we’d ‘sneak in’ on the final day, be ‘in and around’ the playoffs for the new season or be able to ‘get back in contention’ over the final few weeks.
And eventually, a sense that, although ‘at one point it looked like we might have a chance’, we fell short. We ‘just couldn’t sustain the challenge’.
It’s the hope that gets you.
Our eventual position was almost the definition of bang average for the division:
12th out of 24. The average number of points across all teams in the league: 63. We got 63. Three clubs get promoted. We were 12th best. We weren’t even close.
The playoffs are designed to keep things interesting, to ensure that most clubs have something to play for towards the end of the season. So yes, it felt at times like we had a chance.
But nearly being in a position where we might have made the playoffs should be seen for what it is: being mid-table. That could be worse and could be better. What it isn’t is almost getting promoted.
Even if we had made the top six, most teams in the playoffs don’t get promoted. It’s an obvious point, but means that ‘hoping for the playoffs’ is ‘hoping to (probably) not get promoted’.
If you do want to get promoted, you need to be good enough to be in the top two. Then, if things don’t quite work out, the playoffs are a back-up: a chance to beat the following pack and make it up anyway.
But to go into the playoffs and have a better chance of going up than not, you need to have a more than 70% chance of winning each of the two rounds. Any side that dominant would most likely be in the top two anyway.
More than that: any side sneaking into sixth is probably not going to win the playoffs. In the last 20 seasons, only three teams have won the League One playoffs after finishing sixth: Scunthorpe in 2008/09, Barnsley in 2015/16 and Millwall in 2016/17.
Only three have from fifth either, compared to eight for third and six for fourth. For all the talk about momentum, better teams tend to finish higher in the table. And teams that finish higher are more likely to win the playoffs.
The playoffs are a heartbreak factory, as Reading fans know better than most. But of course we’d rather be in them than miss out entirely.
Even so, to be realistic about getting out of this division, we need to raise our sights. We have to aim to be better than at least all but one of the clubs coming down and all of the eight clubs still in the division that finished above us, or vice versa (while not letting anyone below overtake us).
That’s a big ask. But if we do fall short of that goal and end up in the playoffs, we’re more likely to break our jinx if we haven’t just about scraped into the top six.
We’re a long way off the level to do that at the moment, but that’s the scale of the challenge. Just chasing the playoffs isn’t enough.
