This is a list of the home team playoff records: 1996 10-5 1997 6-6 1998 7-6 1999 12-3 2000 12-2-2 2001 11-3-3 2002 9-3-4 -------------- 67-28-9 .6875
Thanks Ben, great stats. That's probably about where it should be IMHO. Home field advantage means something, and there's more than a 2-1 disparity in results. Obviously the teams that obtain the home field advantage are generally better teams and that accounts for something as well. This is one reason I'm against the home & home format, it minimizes this advantage, creates a very real opportunity for a significantly worse team to make it to the championships, and it de-emphasizes the regular season. (My other reason is more major and it deals with attendance and TV exposure). What was the format in 1997 and 1998, because the numbers appear rather even in those years? (Senility has it's drawbacks!). -Tron
For the life of me, I can't see where you got the percentage. I come up with a winning percentage of 64.42% overall or 70.53% wins vs losses.
Re: Re: Home-field advantage in the playoffs I was going by the standard measure of counting ties as half wins for % purposes. Obviously, that's not satisfactory in a sport that doesn't give half the points for a tie, but it doesn't make a difference in a two-team competition.
Regular season home records: 2002 77-41-22 2001 83-45-28 I'll do the rest later, but I hope everyone can agree that home field is a huge deal. As long as we keep home field in the playoffs, it really does make the regular season results meaningful. This home and home stuff we're hearing about is a disaster.
"Home field advantage" is worth even less when you don't use away goals as a tie-breaker, which is apparently what MLS proposes. The only "advantage" next year will be that the "mini-game" and PKs will be on your pitch if you're tied on total goals after 2 matches. BFD.
This thread should be read by all those people that say that two-legged playoffs are OK because the good teams will be playing bad ones. In MLS, even the bad teams usually win their home games during the playoffs. The problem for them is that they only get one home game each round. In a two-legged system, what will happen is that the crap team will win their home game and the good team will win their home game. And in the end, an entire season's worth of hard work will result only in being able to host a sudden-death mini-game and possibly PKs. That's a tremendous home-field advantage.
Ummm...if the higher seed advances in case of a tie, then that's a huge advantage for the higher seed. That's practically starting 1-0.
That's what they do in Mexico, and it's probably the only way I'd go for a two-leg system. It's the only two-leg system that really gives an advantage to the higher seeds.
MLS will not consider that, I guarantee you. They are talking about a "mini-game" and then PKs if both teams are tied on total goals after two matches. No away-goal tie-breaker. So that means the only "advantage" the higher-seeded team has is that the mini-game and penalties take place on your field after the completion of the second game. Some advantage.
I wonder if anyone has stats on the home field advantage in the play-offs vs. the regular season. On a hunch, the play-off win/loss % should be a lot closer.
regular season and playoffs aren't comparable. a home-field advantage in regular season doesn't mean the same pattern will hold for the playoffs, especially in the most important games. home-and-home isn't something mls made up. it's used by major international club competitions (ucl, cl). it always involves a 'lower seed' getting a home game, even in situations where the two teams not only carry different seeds, but even come from different leagues with different degrees of difficulty, different levels of stress, etc. iow, many around here wouldn't consider the ucl or the cl formats fair either. but you don't hear the sort of complaining out of europe or south america, that bs posters do about the mls format. the only thing i'd change is that i'd count away goals, but i guess mls doesn't want to alienate the arithmetically challenged american public. and when people mention the old 'best of three' i just hope they're not about to suggest it be brought back.
There's a big difference between a playoff system that is an extension of a regular season format between teams who are playing against the same set of teams in both formats and some established pecking order already exists; and international club tournaments which are usually separated by an entire season, and are contested between teams who by-in-large have not competed against one-another to qualify into said tournament. Apples and oranges. Especially when most BS posters argue tooth and nail whenever any comparison is brought suggesting that the CL is in anyway a "playoff". To state that we have playoffs because of American conventions, then in the same breath suggest that it's superior logic to go against the very American convention of granting a home-field advantage in said playoffs bc "that's how it's done in Europe" seems a very contradictory argument to me. If you want this to be a playoff, there is a certain manner in which such things are handled and representation of regular season standings is one of them. If you want this to be a cup competition, then there is a certain way that is handled but they are not intended to be a substitution for the league seasons from which those teams qualified. Ie, the Champion's League winner is not considered to be the winner of the respective leagues from which qualification was taken. It's an entirely separate competition, so the rules for advancement can be acceptably arbitrary. In light of the fact that the playoff is really an extention of the regular season and it's winner supercedes regular season excellence, trying to make a comparison to stand-alone tournaments like EL or CL is a very short-sighted representation of the aims of the playoffs vs CL or EL.
it's not a contradiction, imo. it's a compromise. single table without playoffs is really too foreign to american culture. best-of-three palyoffs are really too foreign to soccer culture (and there's not enough interest in mls anyway, frankly). you could make all playoff matches a one-off, nfl-style, but frankly i don't see the point. the real issue with mls isn't playoff format. it's parity. parity is what really determines what kind of league this is, and what kind of results we get. parity is what gets you the two big favorites (ny and la at that point) to lose their deciding home games by a combined score of 1-6. the playoff format is just the tail. parity is the dog, imo.
It's a bad compromise and not a good thing to base a post-season playoff on. When you throw out function in favor of conventions, especially conventions that aren't intended for what you are trying to accomplish, you compromise the integrity of the institution that you try to validate, in this case the playoffs. In this case you compromise the integrity of the idea of what playoffs are supposed to do to emulate a tournament-style structure where the objectives are completely different. This is a non-starter in most leagues. Imo, parity is only a small part of the equation, but the current playoff structure overaccentuates it's effects on the overall winner. Regardless of how much parity you enact on the league's makeup there are always going to be better teams and worse teams bc you always have to account for differences in coaching, chemistry, etc. But this isn't about offsetting parity so much as having a proper setup for a post-season that is supposed to be considered a viable extension of the regular season. Trying to compromise with a stand-alone setup which was not created with the same purpose in mind runs contrary to what playoffs mean in every other sport in this country and serves to devalue all aspects of the regular season short of simply making the playoffs. For all intents and purposes a team may as well rest their players once they clinch a playoff berth bc all else has little value in the current setup. No other US league allows such a question to arise. There is always value in attaining a higher seeding.
it's not as different as you pretend. it's the same issue in both cases, stripped of circumstantials: two teams play each other, one is better than the other (and in ucl or cl 'better than the other' often means more than in mls, if anything), and yet each gets just one home game. parity is the heart and core of mls. but how much value do you need? if two teams finish the regular season separated by a few points, and especially in a case (as mls again will become) of not having a balanced schedule, how much home-field advantage do you think is really warranted? you want a best-of-three? that's been tried and wasn't popular/didn't work well. a one-off at the higher seed? not so fair if the points gap is minimum and the schedule each team played wasn't even the same.
Wake me up when the big European teams have a real chance of not finishing in the CL on a regular basis. Until then it's a oligopoly. Too bad so many US fans want to see Harlem Globetrotter-style competition.
The aggregate format is appropriate for tournaments where there is no good way to seed the teams because the teams come from different leagues. In such a tournament, the ideal format is one that neutralizes homefield advantage. Therefore, the aggregate format is a great idea for tournaments such as the UEFA champions league. However, for tournaments where you are able to seed teams because they have all just played a 30+ game season in the same league, a better format is one that gives significant advantage to the higher seed (which in turn gives greater incentive to perform well in regular season games). There are only three formats that I consider ideal for MLS. 1. Single game single elimination. Gives the higher seed homefield advantage during every minute of play. 2. Some sort of three game series single elimation. Gives the higher seed a homefield advantage for potentially 2/3 of the minutes of action. 3. If people insist on some sort of aggregate format, go to the Mexican format where the lower seed must beat the higher seed in regulation to advance. If aggregate ends in a tie, the higher seed advances. To me, if your record is inferior over a 30+ game season, you should only advance if you can beat that higher seed during regulation play. Such a format would allow the home team to start the playoff encounter at home, because there are no pk's or OT to worry about. Making a higher seed travel first always seemed unfair to me. The Mexican league format also has the advantage of eliminating the need for PK's and generally ensuring that matches don't go way beyond their scheduled time (this matters a lot to those in charge of TV programming).