[Rick TYler]

Statistics are funny things...

During the Great Renumbering of ???, how high did the numbers go? I know some of us relative newcomers think team 50 must be older than team 400, but we know that this is not true since the numbers were assigned alphabetically during the Great Renumbering. Can an oldtimer fill us on on the year of the GR, and how many teams were numbered that year?

If the GR went up to 700 or so (which IIRC is pretty close), I can't come up with any hypothesis as to why team number and scoring are related. I can think of some other measures that might make sense (team budget vs scoring, regional roots vs scoring, previous success vs scoring), but not team numbers within the range of "original numbers." It's interesting that your data seem to show a positive slope on the team number vs scoring curve, but I suspect it is either the law of small numbers (the sample is not statistically significant), or it is a meaningless coincidence.

I would also buy the hypothesis that Anciente Teames (pre-GR) can be treated as a single statistical population, and each year cohort since then could be treated as a population. It would be interesting to test this by grouping all the ATs together.

The last comment I wanted to make is that I find it encouraging that you can demonstrate my intuition that rookie teams are outperformed by veterans, and shows that veteran teams might spend more effort in mentoring rookies.

Thanks for taking the time to assemble the numbers. Good work. (I learned more valuable life-math in Statistics than I did in my other math classes.)