The gospel of Toast continues to be empirically true for another year. No team declared toast made the playoffs again.
Question for potential offseason work: retro-analyses of past seasons? Before @Knave started doing Lord Toast's work, has any team gotten into what we could now call toasted status and made the playoffs?
Nobody has ever done the work to figure that out. My suspicion is that, sometime back in the days when 80% of the teams made the playoffs, some technically toasted team probably made the playoffs. But things were different back then.
Yes, the Crew in 1996. They won their last 10 matches (some in shootouts) after firing Timo Liekoski and promoting assistant Tom Fitzgerald to sneak into the playoffs.
I hear a bunch of MLS bigwigs are coming to Sacramento on Monday to announce a new San Diego MLS team.