Of course it's not as big today. Baseball teams have played "unbalanced" schedules for years now. Directly comparing the overall records of two teams in the same league but different divisions is apples and oranges these days. Plus, there used to be no playoff series for the penant and it was decided strictly by wins and losses. The Penant, being so determined, decided which two teams faced off in the World Series as it still does. So in essense, the penant was the season. Of course much more emphasis was placed then on wins in the regular season. This is what we all would like to achieve for MLS.
I probably should have put the sarcasm tags on around my post about Roy Williams. I know at UNC if you win the ACC 10 years in a row and can't get a national championship they'd probably fire you.
And yet, each individual regular season game was still close to meaningless, because there was 154 (now 162) of them.
Since this topic won't go away, and since I'm dedicated to dispelling some popular notions on the subject, I will pimp my own thread again. https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?p=3313060 Executive Summary: The data indicate that 1- Seeding matters 2- The regular season is not as meaningless as the first round of the playoffs 3- We can't really evaluate the new playoff format, because it's only been here a year before now, but so far it's done nothing to dispel the first two conclusions