Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute Not sure what happened here.. mods can delete my posts here if they want to clean it up
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute Would I prefer a larger reward (like a bye)? Yes. But no one ever wins the championship without at least some degree of home field advantage. It means a lot.
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute Cobblestone. You present a legit dilemma in your two posts, one that I don't think has been solved yet. But let's not forget the series OT (does CCL have that one?), which is some form of home field. We can argue over whether it's enough.
Betfair has Liverpool as a 49-1 longshot, Newcastle 319-1, and Everton 389-1. Those are some ferociously long odds, and this is still October. Realistically, there are only four teams with a prayer of winning the league, and you'd have to go back over a decade to find more than a couple of different ones that did. Most Premiership managers are running clubs that have never won a title in their lifetime, and they'd be fools if they ever expect to do so. You might be happy to view a place in the UEFA Cup as the pinnacle of success, but that's not how it works on this side of the Atlantic.
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute Yeah, the All Star game move is pure idiocy in MLB. Of course, with baseball, it's not like the 162-game season determines nothing more than homefield advantage for a majority of the teams. With a smaller percentage of teams getting in, they play the regular season primarily to get into the playoffs in the first place.
Odds schmodds. Man Utd were 10-1 before last Sunday and have now had their odds slashed. CL placings are very important and not only because of the $30 millon extra revenue. And oh come on! You're not seriously suggesting that any MLS side would not turn down a UEFA cup place? Besides which whats title winning teams got to do with meaningless regular season (okay Stan, virtually meaningless) and a dodgy seeding system where home advantage doesn't actually mean much more than no minor jet lag.
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute Good points. Homefield advantage in MLS is comparable to homefield advantage in other leagues. What I'm questioning, however, is that, with a 30 game regular season in a league where 8 out of 10 teams make the postseason, is this slight homefield advantage enough of a reward? In the other leagues you bring up, a smaller percentage of the league makes it in the playoffs, so a playoff berth is the main reward for a season well-played. In MLS, however, with 8 of 10 in (which I'm not complaining about - at least not here), it seems like more of a reward is justified for the teams that finish on top. -Second, Wheelock just had to throw in the (europoseur, if you'll excuse the namecalling) last paragraph about how the two-game series is somehow an 'improvement.' According to what he just argued, it most certainly is not! In the following thread, I went over the reasons why the old three game system was ample enough advantage to heavily favor the higher seeds, to the point where just making the playoffs and considering the regular season as meaningless would be stupid for any coach. https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?p=3313060 Wheelock's position on this issue tends to undermine the credibility of his argument.[/QUOTE] I agree with you here.
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute I love upsets. I just think that, after playing a 30 game season, a team should be rewarded with safeguards against being upset - a bigger advantage for the higher seeds, since so many teams make the playoffs.
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute Well, while I would prefer 6 of 12 (next year) with home field and a bye, I note that no team in 16 tries has won the Cup (and only one team has made the Final) without the home field at least once. And teams that get it twice are about three and a half times as likely to make the Cup Final as teams that only get it once. So while I think more reward would justified, the historical advantage is not to be sneezed at (as so many have), and it's too early to say whether the current format doesn't still provide some solid protion of it. [Note: this has been my little soapbox for the past couple weeks. I'm hoping, piece by piece, to change some perceptions. Lest anyone think I'm a complete one-note song, I figure I'll be quiet about it for a good while after the playoffs finish].
That sounds more like dismissal than debate. Besides, to be consitant, you might let us know which odds you're using. At the aforementioned betfair, ManU's odds are still about 9:1. The next best shot is Liverpool, at 50:1. That does sound like a lot of teams "stuck in the middle" 1 - what in the world does it NOT have to do with a meaningless regular season? How do you define meaning? How much meaning does it have to finish 9th instead fo 13th? Most Premiership matches after the halfway point are meaningless. 2 - MLS's (previous to the final data on the new format) regular season technically eliminates 2 of 10 teams, but realistically eliminates 6 of 10, and further gives 2 of the remaining 4 pretty weak odds. That's not 'virtually' meaningless, either. The argument can be made that MLS's regular season under that format is *more* meaningful than the Premierships. Frankly, that more of MLS's regular season matches are more meaningful for a greater number of teams than the EPL is beyond debate, especially if we bracket out the Champions' League and relegation.
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute San Jose in 2001 was the #5 seed and did not have home field advantage in either of the first two rounds. But they earned it by beating the so-called better teams on the road.
I hope you realize that there's a big difference between 10-1 (now 7-1, IIRC) and 49-1, let alone 319-1. If 319-1 teams ever had a reasonable chance of winning, sports gambling would be more lucrative than running a hedge fund. Wheelock makes a false comparison between MLS and Europe. He idealizes a system where the same teams win year after year. The "meaning" that he hypes up is completely irrelevant to us. Even among soccer fans, nobody gives a rat's tuckus about the Concacaf Champions Cup, or carry delusions about promotion/relegation. Teams in countries like the US and Mexico aim for playoff seeding. That's a fact of life, and in both countries, the higher seeds tend to win in the playoffs. Even if that doesn't happen this particular year, I doubt many Quakes or Revs fans would write off their team's regular season escapes as meaningless.
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute Sorry, I forgot about the three-division, one-table playoff format. I had forgotten that I kind of fudged them in as a two seed (in their division). So I should use an asterisk. (If they'd had two-conference setup, their seeding would be speculative, as the scheduling would have been different. They finished tied for 4th on points with Columbus, but I assume Columbus won the tiebreaker). Even there, it's important to note that the home field made some difference to them: their home record was perfect, and their road record was 1-1-1 (by the regular season standard we'd use now; they won the last in OT--was that a series OT or game OT?). -- Pretty congruent, isn't it, that SJ is the one team that is the clear favorite to advance this year despite a pretty mediocre record (interesting to note that this record masks one of the better GF:GA ratios in the league).
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute If the league had been in 2 geographical divisions, SJ would have been 3rd behind Chicago and LA. But as you say, the schedule would have been different. If the Quakes had missed the playoffs this year they would have been the first ever to do so with a positive goal difference.
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute And there's also the patented Landon Donovan Playoff Step-Up to consider.
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute Are you telling me that you think that homefield advantage is worthy of playing 30 games for?
Re: 10/28/04: Champagne Flute And if you perfer more valuable reward like a bye week, why to do try so hard to defend the current format? When people say its meaningless, its not meant literally. People can find meaning in anything if they look hard enough.