It’s ambitious, but I wouldn’t say it’s ‘hopelessly optimistic’. Right now, I think we can feel reasonably confident about our ability to win our home games and all of our remaining fixtures at the Stoop are against teams that are below us in the table (largely because of their away form).
Without wanting to make this too geeky, our current win percentage is 54.8% (7 wins form 13 games). To get 5 wins from the remaining 9, it would need to be 55% so it’s very close.
On the one hand, you could argue that we have more away fixtures at the end of the season which may negatively impact our chances. However, on the other, I’d argue that we’re quite a bit better than we were in the first quarter of the season.
We’ve also scored 10 bonus points this season which is excellent (Exeter are the only team with more). If you extrapolate that out across the 13 fixtures played it’s roughly .77 bonus points per game. Across the remaining 9 games, a similar return would give us 6.93 bonus points. Even if we round that down, it’s more than the 4 DOK suggested we need.
I think we can win the four home games and pick up at least 1 BP. That’s another 21 points. I also think we can one of our away games - Bath, Sale and Wasps are all beatable IMO. If we win one of those and pick up at least one more losing BP, that gives another 5 points and the magic number of 64.
In summary, ambitious; yes, impossible; no.