[ChrisE]

With only about three weeks left before the league begins, and very few posts recently, I thought I'd start this thread.

There was a thread on rec.sport.soccer back around the 2002 World Cup where people predicted who would get out of the group stage. However, instead of just straight predicting who would get through, they gave teams odds. So, for example, in the US's group the odds might have been Portugal .7; South Korea .6; U.S. .4; Poland .3. Since two teams get through, they sum to 2. I was wondering if anybody would be interested in doing something similar for MLS. It's a good deal more inconvenient, since there's 5 different positions per division, as opposed to just 1; however, we don't have 8 groups to worry about here. I'd imagine a sample bracket for the west would look something like:

	1	2	3	4	5	
Colorado	0.3	0.4	0.1	0.05	0.15	1
Dallas	0.2	0.1	0.15	0.35	0.2	1
Ka City	0.05	0.05	0.1	0.3	0.5	1
Los A.	0.1	0.2	0.4	0.2	0.1	1
San Jose	0.35	0.25	0.25	0.1	0.05	1
	1	1	1	1	1	5

I think doing it by conference might be preferable since you end up with only 50 entries instead of a hundred, and the numbers don't get quite so low.

So, if anyone's interested in trying something like this (I'm not offering any prizes or anything...), or has any suggestions about a different kind of competition, say so.