(QUICK NOTE: As mentioned in my intro, I invite any readers so inclined to send in power rankings of their own. Join the Collective today!)

May as well start with something easy, ‘cause the rest of this is damned messy. Here are the pundits/observers/fans included in this week’s collective rankings.

Center Holds It (me)
Goal.com (Kyle McCarthy)
Orlando Sentinel (Brant Parsons)
Fullback Files (um…Fullback?)
Sideline Views (Luis Bueno)
AYL Soccer (Jacob Hart writes, but it looks collective)
WVHooligan (Drew Epperley)
Blue Blooded Journo (a collective)
ESPN.com (collective)
Soccer Spin (Barry Penner)

For the record, a couple sites dropped out of The Collective this week - FSC's and 3rd Degree's - but I take blame for all absences; I am posting a day early, after all. Also, a fella named pate posts a different kind of rankings on his site, which is called On Soccer. Pate’s Week 3 Scariness Rankings don’t fit in my set-up, but they do give all y’all another way of looking at MLS’s patch of the world.

That’s the number of pundits: but what are these 10 sites telling us about how Major League Soccer’s 14 teams stack up against each other? To paraphrase Operation Ivy, all they know is that they don’t know nothing. There’s a four-team collision knotting up third - from which, it should be noted, the second place team barely escaped. If you think that’s bad, consider the actual 3-way-tie for 8th. Then again, this means there’s already a playoff race and the season is just three weeks old. Whether it’s good or bad, I can basically posit that there’s a #1 team, the crapola trio at the bottom, and a whole lot of disagreement about everything in between. All done!

No, I can’t leave it there...wouldn’t be right. I’ll pick through the details after the data, which will come right after I explain the layout of said data: each team will be listed by rank and with their average, collective score following. To provide some perspective, the most common score(s) assigned to each team by the individual members of the collective will appear in parentheses after that, followed by the previous week’s ranking and average. Here’s the data:

1. Chicago Fire, 1.3 (#1 X 7; last week, #3, 3.8)
2. Chivas USA, 3.9 (#5 X 3; last week, #2, 1.8)
3. Colorado Rapids, 4.1 (#4 X 4; last week, #7, 6.8)
4. Kansas City Wizards, 4.4 (#2 X 3; last week, #1, 1.6)
5. FC Dallas, 4.5 (#6 X 3; last week, #9, 7.8)
6. New England Revolution, 4.6 (#3 X 3; last week, #5, 5.3)
7. Columbus Crew, 7.2 (#7, #8, and #9 X 2; last week, #10, 10.5)
8/9/10. DC United, 8.9 (#6, #10, and #11 X 2; last week, #4, 4.0)
8/9/10. Houston Dynamo, 8.9 (#11 X 4; last week, #8, 7.4)
8/9/10. Real Salt Lake, 8.9 (#9 X 3, #10 X 3; last week, #12, 11.4)
11. Red Bull New York, 9.4 (#9 X 5; last week, #6, 6.7)
12. Toronto FC, 12.0 (#12 X 8; last week, #13, 13.45)
13. Los Angeles Galaxy, 12.9 (#13 X 9; last week, #11, 10.9)
14. San Jose Earthquakes, 14.0 (#14 X 10; last week, #14, 13.54)

Starting with the easy stuff...

- So, Chicago is your #1 team....I’m steadying myself....sort of a blow.

- To fully appreciate the scope of perceptions in play here, consider the following: the #2 team, Chivas, received more #5 rankings than any other; #6 got more #3 rankings than anything else; but the really bloody stuff comes with teams like Columbus and DC - I mean, look at the details in those rankings. Ew. The only team on which everyone agreed was San Jose, the worst team in MLS...with a bullet.

- Do note, however, the near unanimity on LA. And Toronto, for that matter.

- If you’re looking for this week’s big climbers, I’d point to FC Dallas and - holy crap! - the Crew, both of whose averages popped up 3.3. The Fire and RSL get honorable mention for their 2.5 gain.

- KC’s fall from grace may look precipitous, but chalk that up to their, frankly, unnatural #1 from Week 2. But DC suffered the real stomach churner, perhaps the biggest I’ve ever seen since starting these rankings: how the f%#$ does your average score fall by 4.9? That’s like a friggin’ elevator in free-fall down a shaft.

- To answer my own question, you lose to RSL by 4 goals to none. Mystery solved.

- Still, who woulda thunk we’d see Houston and DC knotted up with RSL on the cusp of the playoffs?

I’m sure there’s more interesting data points in there, but my big take-away from this is....really? Are DC and Houston really somewhere around 8th, 9th, and 10th? Is Red Bull really 11th - e.g. a ways out of playoff contention? I get that part of this arises from the criteria people use in compiling their rankings - for instance, I rank teams by who would beat whom on the following weekend - but...still. Suffice to say, April in MLS seems a lot like October in politics - only it’s a little crazier.

Till next Thursday.