http://www.nasl.com/news/2017/01/20/2017-nasl-season-set-to-kick-off-on-march-25 Spring Season starts on March 25. So teams will play a couple of other teams three times in each Season. Playoffs stay the same. Hmmm. Start on March 25 and end the regular season on October 29. There are 32 weeks in that span. Assuming at least a little bit of break between the Seasons that might mean just one mid-week game. Possible dates: Spring Season- March 25-July 2 (15 weekends) Fall Season - July 15-October 29 (16 weekends) We shall see.
BTW, the 2017 U.S. Open Cup dates have already been announced. We don't know how the USSF is going to organize the tournament in terms of entry by the NASL and USL but NASL teams would probably enter in the 2nd or 3rd round. http://www.ussoccer.com/stories/201...up-rescheduled-second-qualifying-round-scores 2017 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup Tournament Schedule Wed., April 12: First Round pairings and Second Round possible matchups announced Wed., May 10: First Round Wed., May 17: Second Round Wed., May 31: Third Round Wed., June 14*: Fourth Round (MLS teams enter) Thur., June 15: Round of 16 Draw Wed., June 28*: Round of 16 Tues., July 11^: Quarterfinals Wed., Aug. 9*: Semifinals Wed., Sept. 20: Final
North Carolina FC has announced their home opener is March 25. The Indy Eleven and NY Cosmos have announced their home openers are April 1. Opponents have not been announced.
Agreed. Although I wish they would have just gone home and home in each half and left it at 28 games total. Hopefully there won't be too many midweek games. Thanks to Newtex we see there are 31 weeks in that calendar span plus time for a break. That will work nicely.
Good burn. Well played sir. Or are you just implying the Cosmos are going to get to the Championship game.
Neil Morris @ByNeilMorris Feb 3 Per league source, @naslofficial expects to announce their 2017 schedule on Monday.
The 2017 schedule is up. http://www.nasl.com/news/2017/02/06/north-american-soccer-league-releases-2017-schedule- Only 3 games the first two weekends. The Spring season runs until July 15. The break is the weekend of July 22-23 and the Fall season starts on July 29. Almost all weekend games in the Spring except a couple of games on the 4th of July. The Fall has about 8 mid-week games.
Opening weeks: Home team first, times are ET. Week 1 Saturday, March 25 North Carolina FC v. Miami FC TBD Puerto Rico FC v. NY Cosmos 7:30 pm San Francisco Deltas v. Indy Eleven 10:00 pm BYES: Jacksonville, Edmonton Week 2 Saturday, April 1 Indy Eleven v. Puerto Rico FC 3:00 pm NY Cosmos v. Miami FC 7:00 pm Sunday, April 2 Jacksonville Armada v. FC Edmonton 4:00 pm BYES: North Carolina, San Francisco
I've only really looked at the Indy schedule but they have a lot of back-to-back games against the same opponent this year. They have at least four sets like that. In May, the Eleven play four games, all against Edmonton and Miami. What's it like for other teams?
The schedule wound up like this: Spring: March 25-July 15 That is 17 weekends with no mid-week games other than Tuesday, July 4, which is effectively an extension of the prior weekend. Fall: July 29-October 29 14 weekends so there are 8 mid-week games. All 8 teams play two of the mid-week games and most split those between home and away. The only exceptions? Jacksonville has two home Wednesdays and Edmonton is away for both of them.
At least the Scottish league has 12 teams. I don't foresee a long future for the NASL. I hope they have an exit strategy as well.
I've never understood this point of view. Why is half the league getting into the playoffs a bad thing?
Ok, and what is so bad about that? Theoretically every team in the league except for the top team in the league could have a losing record.
Competition wise? The playoff system is already a flawed system of determining the best in the league. There's an interesting episode of Adam Ruins Everything: Football. Long story short, the NY Giants had a 9-7 record and it was the worst of any Super Bowl champion. It's a Mickey Mouse league with 8 teams. Kind of like if you have a fantasy league, there's no parity. You can have "big spending" clubs buy a championship.
One and done is a poor way to determine the champion yes, the playoff system is not a poor way to determine the champion (have to beat the best to be the best). In a one and done system I would only give the league a 50% chance to get the actual best team winning the championship. If they have a series of games, best two out of three for example, the odds of the champion being the best team drastically increases.
Here are the number of back-to-backs against the same team. They are all over the place so maybe this is just a fluke but it still seems odd. There definitely are a lot of these games. Miami - 7 Edmonton - 6 Indy - 5 San Francisco - 4 NY Cosmos - 3 North Carolina - 3 Puerto Rio - 2 Jacksonville - 1 Miami does this against almost every team in the league. They miss North Carolina but do it twice against San Francisco. NOTE: I did not count the North Carolina-Puerto Rico games on July 15 and 29 since the mid-season break is in between them. That is also the only pair where one team hosts both of them.
Any time you add more games to the competition, the chances the "better" team wins and provides the mythical "true champion" go up, obviously. But these are the systems we have. The World Series at best of seven is probably not the optimal way to truly determine who the "better" of two fairly well matched baseball teams is, just like any one-off playoff runs the risk of a fluke play influencing the outcome. But that's life. No one wants a best-of-22 World Series and we like one-game pageantry and stuff like that. At the end of the day, this is entertainment and nothing more. If getting it "right" (however you define that) were the most important thing, it would have happened by now.
Unfortunately the amount of people that would say yes to that is probably higher then you think it is.