I've seen many people hypothesise that teams raise their games against us, so would suffer in their next game.
I looked at the data. Removing all our games, the other 25 teams average 1.291 pts/game.
In the 33 games after teams played us, they average 1.227 pts/game.
Is 0.064 a big effect?
It's statistically unreliable.
The sample size is too small.
And too affected by who they play. If it's Cambridge at home then a drop off is clear, if it's Bolton or Wrexham away less so.
When looking at the PL to eliminate the random noise of when you get the fixture you'd need to play 10 seasons with the same teams.
Stevenage are at Reading on Saturday. Most likely they'll lose. Not because they've played us, but because Reading aee quite strong at home. If they were at home to Cambridge or Shrewsbury they'd probably win. It's that sort of thing that makes it difficult to know what is a trend and what is just random.
That's why I tried to take an average across the whole season. Across 46 games, it multiples out to about 3 points.
Hardly a glaring effect imho.