Write On Sports LLC - "MLS Regular Season: Satisfaction on Hold" by Jeff Bull

MLS Regular Season: Satisfaction on Hold

2006-09-18 22:05:20 | By: Jeff Bull

If anyone out there has the answer - hell, an answer will do - regarding the favorite team to win MLS Cup please pass it on. By day’s end Wednesday, September 20th, every team in Major League Soccer will have only four games remaining in the regular season, yet picking a likely winner out of the scramble looks no less daunting today than it did on April 1, when the season started. The league’s rigid policies in support of parity explain a fair chunk of the picture, but with things tighter than ever within both the Eastern and Western Conferences, it appears there’s something else at work.

The top of the table seems as logical a place as any to start the search for potential champions, but logic isn’t MLS’s chief currency. Both teams at the top of the two conferences - DC United in the East and FC Dallas in the West - have stumbled toward the end of the regular season and are riding cushions they built earlier this year. Between them, FC Dallas has it worse, having won only twice and tied once in their last eight league games, making the threat of being subsumed into the jumbled Western Conference pack all-too-plausible. Should that happen, they risk not only a crushing blow to their confidence but more concrete advantages like playing games at home in the playoffs.

DC United sits a little prettier, though their comparatively lofty perch has picked up stains of its own. With an eleven point advantage - earned under a points system that gives three points for a win and one for a draw - only a collapse of historic proportions would deprive DC United of home-field advantage throughout the playoffs; for this to come about, however, the Chicago Fire, their nearest competitors, would have to win all their remaining games will DC would have to lose all of theirs. As poorly as DC is playing right now, that’s a big stretch. At the same time, DC’s late-season slump has seen them slip against intra-conference rivals - specifically, the New England Revolution and, worse, the Chicago Fire - either of whom they could meet in the playoffs. With overall performance stalled, DC could really use the psychological edge of winning these four-game season series.

Beneath those two teams, the race for playoff seeding remains wide-open - almost ridiculously so. Only the Chicago Fire enjoys relative safety in either conference, leaving the rest of the teams to battle for playoff spots three and four in the East, and two through four in the West; though, if one takes the darkest view of FC Dallas’ late-season swoon, that could be expanded to one through four in the West. With four games remaining for each team (with New England and Red Bull New York the exceptions until Wednesday night) here is where they all stand: in the East, DC United has 52 points, Chicago has 41, the New England Revolution have 35 with a game in hand, the Kansas City Wizards have 33, Red Bull New York has 32 with a game in hand, while the Columbus Crew sits realistically outside the picture on 26 points. In the West, FC Dallas tops the division on 46 points, followed by the Houston Dynamo on 40, Chivas USA and the Colorado Rapids, who are both on 39 points, Real Salt Lake with 36, while last year’s champions, the Los Angeles Galaxy look shaky for the post-season on 33 points. Simple subtraction shows that three points currently separates the competition in the East and only seven points stands between the last-place Galaxy and the second-place Dynamo in the West.

Tedious as the above exercise may seem, it’s crucial to grasping the difficulty of making any solid calls on a probable winner for 2006; after all, how to do that when the first-round playoff match-up for any given team remains a mystery? Between the format for the first round of MLS’s playoffs - it’s a home-and-home series, which mean the teams play two games, one in the home stadium of each team - and quirks that arise when any two MLS teams play, the identities of the teams in question matters quite a bit. To give an example, as well as DC United has done early in the season, the Chicago Fire is not only widely considered the hottest team in MLS, but they’re also DC United’s “bogey-team” - i.e. a team that somehow always sneaks in to serve as the fly in DC’s ointment. And that’s before even considering DC’s recent slumping form.

In the end, it’s that gigantic mash of mediocrity in the middle of both conference tables that gets fans worried about the quality of the league. The more closely one follows the results - and, as one who has compiled weekly predictions on a site called ArmchairGM, I’ve followed them as closely as anyone - the less one sees good teams setting the standard for the league. When FC Dallas and DC seemed to be creating some separation from the pack, fans could hold up both as examples of relative excellence, but what happens now? What does one say when all the league’s teams seem more or less interchangeable and, arguably, anonymous?

It should be noted that not everyone worries about this. Andrea Canales, a pundit for both ESPN’s Soccernet and Soccer365, wrote quite a happy column about just how wide open the playoff race was back in late August; and with Columbus, and arguably Los Angeles excepted, it’s no less wide-open today. Canales celebrates the unpredictability described above and argues that everyone will always have something to play for on any given weekend - or else. It’s fair defense, but what’s missing is no less important: quality. Anyone who has seen more than a dozen boxing matches knows there’s something unsatisfying in winning by decision; fans want the knockout and the question of who won made clear and real by the sight of one boxer lying on his back. Part of the pleasure in watching any sport comes with seeing the game played well.

When MLS Cup comes - and, quite probably, the playoffs themselves - we’ll more than likely get the sharp experience of seeing one team out-perform the one it’s competing against. In the end, fans will have the satisfaction of knowing who played better on the day - or, in the first-round, over the two days - of the competition. This element went missing in 2006. As a result, the regular season felt endless, frankly, like a six-month-long dress rehearsal for the playoffs. Nice as it is that we’re down to the wire and that each game now contains due dramatic tension, the sorry spectacle of that mid-table muddle, not to mention of seeing the two teams who once stood above it all collapse back inside, it would have been nicer still to have some teams to celebrate this season.