It's almost 2019,... and lo, the playoffs remain flawed; the defense of the regular ssn continues...

Those competitions do not represent the league. C'mon Jasonma,... You shouldn't need me to explain the difference between a cup competition and a league playoff system. Even Mexico gets this distinction since no other league Cup competition ever gave the high seed the automatic tiebreaker in the event of a draw. So long as MLS Cup represents our league title you simply cannot treat it like a domestic cup competition. BTW we already have one of those...

If you want MLS Cup to emulate the rules of an FA Cup with no bearing on regular season performance why not go all the way and have random draws. You draw the line there? Why? And if it should be just like an FA Cup rule wise then it should represent nothing more than an FA Cup, ie not be considered our league title...

You cannot and should not have this both ways...

 

As stated before, football has a much smaller sample size to begin with. Now let's break down the NCAA example because this is not a very good example for what you're advocating for due to a couple of reasons.

The college conferences that are permitted to use conference title games are split into N/S, or E/W divisions who do not play one another during the regular season much if at all and thus creating a neutral final makes sense given the sample size, hardly the same situation in a professional league with 34 games in it's regular season. There's a reason why conference championships are not permitted for conferences below a certain size. All "Big 12" teams are able to play one another during their season and thus the need for a neutral conference final is completely subverted and thus not permitted by NCAA rules.

MLS using a neutral final and ignoring the regular season is the near equivalent of the "Big 12" being allowed to add a conference final despite the fact that the conference season does this job efficiently. In this case NCAA rules take into account the efficacy of the regular season when they decide who can or cannot use a conference title game to begin with. So even when MLS was single table, they used playoffs to determine champions which by NCAA rules, would not have been permitted. So even using this example, college football takes does this into account. In cases where all teams have an opportunity to demonstrate superiority during the regular season, a neutral final simply does not take place. Instead you have the "single table" setup. I don't think that you're advocating for a single table.

As for the National title playoffs etc, these match-ups are roughly the equivalent of the Champions League setup in that conferences have very, very few opportunities to meet one another during the season and therefore, no objective comparative basis can be found upon which to establish any earned advantage warranting anything other than a neutral site final.

Not even remotely equivalent. It's not deciding a league champion, nor is it even deciding all the promotion slots since the first two placed teams in the Championship automatically go thru.

 

That's not a good reason to decide how you award your league championship and pretty much all sports agree on this point in one manner or another. The idea that you highlight pretty much only exists in Cup competitions. For every league that has a playoff system in N. America, every single one, a logical basis can be found to justify every single aspect of it's composition.

The neutral final in the NFL can be justified as fair in competitive terms. Soccer/footbal leagues that use playoffs all seem to account to some extent for the regular season in a manner different from straight cup affairs. Even Liga MX accounts for this by allowing the higher seed to have the final tiebreaker.

No league awards it's league champion with rule-sets that ignore the regular season for the simple reason that one must justify the validity of said title's worth. A league playoffs that ignores this cannot be said to be anything other than a league cup competition and thus it's value vis-a-vis (in the case of MLS) the Supporters Shield (which benefits from a larger sample size) can reasonably be debated. What establishes the validity of MLS Cup is the fact that it shores up the shortcomings of the MLS regular season (imbalanced schedule despite all teams mostly playing one another) while also rewarding the performances established over those games at the same time. The fact that it can do both of these things is what grants it precedence and legitimacy. If you take one of these things away, you take away that legitimacy and create a championship whose legitimacy is roughly equivalent to the SS at best.

There are simply no examples of league championships in any sport that have no logical basis and are entirely arbitrary in their construction. None. For every neutral final etc, there is an underlying validity to it's nature; ie no sufficient comparative basis upon which to award any advantage and thus the neutrality of the event is not arbitrary at all but rather a necessity. MLS fans who advocate for neutral finals are doing so on the basis of non-competitive factors and aesthetics which should have no place in the task of constructing a legitimate and properly representative league championship.

Once again, if you're going to call it a league championship, then it must fit the role that and it's design must follow function. It would be like designing a space-borne spacecraft with wings simply because that's what the Space Shuttle looked like ignoring the fact that said wings were necessitated by an atmospheric landing stage. Putting wings on a spacecraft intended to travel only in space would be nonsense and arbitrary and could not even be called wings since they don't perform the function of wings. You would only be calling them wings due to some in-bred need to have wing-looking things that you could call wings and have wasted money constructing them simply so that you could have them there and call them wings.

That last paragraph was a bit of tangent (you should know by now that I like tangents) but I'll tie it up here. An MLS playoffs which ignores the regular season would no longer be a playoff system but rather a invitational league cup competition. You can still call the winner of said competition a "League Champion" just as you could call wing-like constructs that exist on a space-borne spacecraft "wings" if you wanted to, but neither would be true in actuality nor have any justification based on their actual function.

 

I forgot that the "Big 12" lobbied for that. There was a reason that the rule existed, however and that was to limit non-essential games and because the "Big 12" Championship now can be won by a team that had a worse record, lost to it's "title game" opponent and now gets to be called "champion" despite having no other reason to warrant the title. That said, the only reason they changed this rule is because every other major conference raped the rest of college football, including the "Big 12" , and formed "Super-Conferences" that all had 14-16 teams (well above the 12 team threshold for title games). This was perceived by the"Big 12" to give those conferences an unfair advantage by having one additional matchup in which to impress the Playoff selection committee or whatever body selects the playoff teams. So they petitioned for a championship game that they did not need for reasons that had nothing to do with their own internal competition simply because they're a greedy little league run by my former school who I still root for but also accept is a greedy little shxt sometimes (Texas) who would rather sit at 10 teams than get with the program and expand like everyone else and thus warrant a championship game rather than the useless construct they've tacked onto the end of their season for the purpose of validating themselves.

So it's still a bad example since they, in blunt terms, created a "championship game" not for the purpose of crowning a championship at all, but rather for the purpose of enabling qualification to bigger competition which crowns a completely different champion. In other words, they didn't need it, the rules didn't allow it, but everyone else had it so the NCAA caved rather than force them to conform to the size and composition that exists for the other P5 conferences because they don't want to share with more teams. Why the other conferences allowed this without complaint leads me to believe that they all know that the "Big 12" won't exist in another decade so fvck it... I'm a Big 12 fan btw...

Big 12 petitioned for this game because they do not want to expand to 12 teams and split their money 12 ways (that and ESPN& Fox begged them not to) and the NCAA acquiesced because either the Big 12 will die in a few years or they'll finally be forced to expand once ESPN& Fox get their acts together, move into the modern age and find a way to monetize their products online. Bottom line,... this is not normal nor even justified and should not be used as an example for this unless you're somehow suggesting that there was an internal competitive reason for the Big 12 getting a title game.

 

I'm not spinning anything and if the best examples that you can come up with is collegiate sports which are full of numerous teams, limitations on competition length based largely on the amateur status of the athletes in question as well as the lack of compensation that said athletes receive as well as other considerations; if you can't tell me that you don't see the difference between these two things, then I can only assume that you're going to insist on a straw-man argument. Fine, I'll give you the NCAA despite the fact that I don't think that it's a convincing or even definitive example for reasons that I've explained.

Fine, we'll simplify it then. Which league's use neutral site championships while breaking the parameters that I have established above. You say that there are numerous leagues, but you haven't given me any examples. I've addressed my objections to each of your points based on my own reasoning. I've given support for those reasons for each and every example that you've presented. That's all that I can do short of caving in and just pretending to agree with you.

It takes two to tango here and in return all you've done is call my arguments "spin" without going into detail and presenting an argument countering the objections to your opinion that I've raised. You claim there are "numerous" other leagues that have neutral championships (not taking into account that this is only part of the equation of what we're discussing here; the NFL has a neutral final with a seeded playoff and home advantage) which is an argument that requires examples. And these examples need to be of the type that invalidates my entire argument, not ones akin to the NFL which have ample reasoning to explain the deficiency. I can't argue or debate a non-existent argument, because that's like a prosecutor being forced to invalidate unnamed witnesses. This is impossible.

So all I can do is present my argument. If you want to debate the points that I've brought up, fine. That's more than welcome. That's the point of this thread is debate. But if you want to just repeat the same thing over and again and ignore the fact that I've repeatedly responded to your argument, point by point and accept nothing but my acquiescence will satisfy you, then just leave it. We're getting nothing done here and I won't waste our time continuing to respond. I generally respect you and your opinions, but the manner in which this particular back and forth is playing out is growing tiresome. So, there you have it. Again, my answers are not spin, they're a response to your counter-arguments which, btw, I've heard before. And they've been answered before by me and various media articles that deal with this same issue. You have an argument, fine. But in my opinion they simply don't hold up to scrutiny. Now I've bent over backwards to address your arguments in multiple posts and paragraphs. Please do me the same courtesy or we'll just have to let our current debate rest...

I will summarize my argument, the only times when neutral venues are valid for league championships is when there are either massive logistical challenges in addition to no valid and fair means of determining an advantage.