Bonus QuestionDoes the missing vowels round still not matter?

Still my proudest accomplishment.

Back in October I put up a post addressing the regular complaint that Only Connect's missing vowels round is 'overpowered' using data from the first seven series of the show. A mere six months after it concluded I thought I'd stick up a quick summary of how adding Series 8's data affected things. The answer? Not much. Still, read on for the latest Only Connect missing vowels stats (until Series 9 finishes in a couple of months and I end up doing it all again).

Turnabout's fair play

For me, the headline statistic when it comes to the importance of missing vowels is turnarounds: how often does a team come from behind after the walls to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat? Across the first seven regular series of Only Connect - comprising 99 episodes - 14 teams achieved this feat. Series 8 added three to this total, taking us to 17 turnarounds in 112 shows, or about twice every 13 episodes. There have still only been four occasions where teams were tied after the walls. (For the extra-curious, all three of the new additions took place in the first four episodes of Series 8, with the Lasletts and the Bakers overturning single-point deficits to defeat the Pilots and Press Gang, respectively, while my team the Board Gamers came back from three behind to overtake the Globetrotters.)

Series 4's Radio Addicts, one of just three teams
to turn around a post-wall deficit of four points.

Unsurprisingly, this hasn't changed another important stat: the biggest missing vowels comeback remains a relatively meagre four points, with this having been accomplished just three times in the show's history. My team was the third to turn things around from three points behind, while four teams have managed a 2-point turnaround. Over half of all the missing vowels comebacks have been from just 1 point behind. If missing vowels is an elaborate scheme to help quick-fingered teams win, it's not a very successful one.

Swing when you're winning

Points swings per round: how much the
team that wins a round will win it by.

A new statistic I thought I'd look at this time is points 'swings' per round: when a team wins a round, how many points they win that round by. This gives a sense of 'volatility': how many points the better team might claw back, or extend their lead by, in each of the four rounds. Doing this we get the table on the right where (for example) we see that on an 'average' episode one team will score about 2.6 more points than the other in the connections round, 3.4 on sequences, 2.4 on the walls, and 4.2 on missing vowels. (For the sake of completeness, the relevant standard deviations tell a near-identical story.)

Of obvious note is the missing vowels swing: on average the team which wins that round will win it by more than any other, albeit by less than one point over sequences. However, the fact that missing vowels so seldom makes a difference to the final outcome of a match suggests that while on average one team will score about 4 points more than their opponents in this round, they will usually either be so far ahead - or behind - that it doesn't matter. Missing vowels has the potential to cause big upsets, but only if one team is exceptionally good at them while simultaneously being rubbish at the rest of the show. Moreover, with so little to choose between the four rounds in absolute terms, the same could be really be said of any of them. (Plus, ultimately, like-for-like comparisons such as this are tricky given the fundamentally different nature of scoring between the rounds.)

Summing up

Finally, an update to the average points per round stats. As the table below shows, Series 8 doesn't stand out at all, with the overall averages largely unchanged (desipte my team's best efforts to drag the walls average down...).

Average points scored (by both teams) per round on Only Connect Series 1-8. (Click for big.)

That's your lot. In short: the missing vowels round is still nowhere near as overpowered as plenty of people seem to think: over 80% of the time it makes no difference to a show's outcome, and even then it will likely only see a one point deficit overturned.

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