No, he hasn't been eaten alive by a Komodo dragon.
I happened across an article on Brentford's recruitment strategy, which strangely enough covered Pardew's 2011-12 5th place finish. This is nothing people on here haven't indicated previously, but it's interesting that others have used data to confirm as much:
The Perfect Marriage
Ankersen and Benham were able to see how the reduced amount of goals in football leads to a huge variability and randomness in the actual results that occur. This often times can be at odds with the underlying performance indicators of a team or player.
The combination of Ankersen’s ideas of context and Benham’s exception ability to generate meaningful data, meant that Brentford were able to decipher the complexity of football better than most. Brentford have been equipped to sort through the randomness of football and therefore make better decisions. They use statistics such as expected goals and assists, shot percentage, shot differentials and conversion rates. Just to name a few of the ones we are even aware of.
The League table always lies
We can all agree that as far as poor football decisions go, giving Alan Pardew a six-year contract is close to the top of the pile. Using Benham’s betting projection algorithms, they took a detailed look into Newcastle’s astonishing 2011/12 season in which they finished in fifth place. On face value, the performance that year from Newcastle was outstanding and worthy of an improved contract. However, when looking at the underlying statistics, the duo were able to point out that Newcastle had hit a purple patch over the year and performed way over the odds. Benham used expected points. This is a statistic developed to predict the outcome of football matches for his betting company.
The red line indicates expected points and the black line actual points. We can see here how Newcastle over-performed in the 2011-12 season.
One of the key factors in this was Papiss Cisse producing a shot conversation rate of 33%, better than Lionel Messi’s 20% at the time. Furthermore, Newcastle had both goal differences and shot differentials completely at odds with the surrounding teams at the top of the table.
These factors were seen as the key reasons given for their subsequent ‘underperformances’ the next year. However, it was not actually a case of underperforming. Rather, Newcastle regressed to their mean over the next year finishing 16th. This type of process is fundamental to Brentford and how they use data in order to understand the context before making decisions.
https://footballbh.net/2019/05/28/brentford-championship-tactical-analysis-statistics-analysis/
