Bobby Convey had the good fortune to be a PGYAP (Potentially Great Young American Player) at a time when there was a shortage of them. The fact that his game was always a bit incomplete and that he never really seemed to deliver the goods when called on was overlooked because of his great overwhelming potential. In my opinion, I think MLS got the better of the deal selling him to an English club. He's not exactly been a world-beater in 2nd Division English football, has he? If he was still in MLS, we'd still be wondering when he was going to live up to his potential. Does this have anything to do with DC's rise and fall? Probably not. But at least there's now a whole more PGYAP's who, in my opinion, play the game better and know how to make their teams better. These players actually deliver for their teams--Gaven, Dempsey, Magee, Johnson, Jewsbury--the list goes on and on. Good for Convey. He's making the big bucks and maybe some day he'll be the player we all thought he could be. But he was lucky to get out when he did.
We'll just have to agree to disagree on this. You see coincidence, I see a distinct pattern. You say we were as strong at the beginning of the year - How many games did we win in a row to start the season? The team's problem opening the year was creating and finishing chances. Gomez has done better than Convey on both counts since arriving, and now we're winning. Bobby's a good player, I'm not arguing that he isn't, but the team is better with him gone.
1) You can't say that the team's better with Convey gone because yopu don't know how they'd have played if he was still on the team. 2) Gomez plays a different position than Convey and he has a different role than Convey. 3) The team is playing better as of late but I see a big recent change is that Kovalenko is playing on the wing (and playing there better than I expected while landing either Gros or Stewart on the bench), and after a couple of games off Carroll is playing better as a d-mid than he did early in the season. Both of these changes occured at the same time as Gomez was getting used to playing with his new team as an a-mid. In other words there was no straight Gomez for Convey switch. Other things happened too. Until you put all of the changes on the table and develop a true correlation between them and the performance of the team your arguements are premature at best.
How about let's wait until the offseason to talk about this. I don't believe this is a coincidence, but don't want to bitch about Bobby, he isn't part of the team, I don't care about him at all right now, let's just focus on supporting DC United and winning it all, not our ex players worth. After the season we can prove the correlation!