MLS was at its best when 80% of the teams got into the post-season. Back when the "You Suck" allocation funds really meant something and were special.
Maybe we should switch to an Aussie Rules style postseason. That would give a real advantage to the higher seeds. But it would be fewer matches and fewer teams qualifying. It's a little complicated, but if the Aussies can understand it, it shouldn't be that hard for people here to get used to.
I don't think MLS should deviate much from a straightforward single elimination bracket. That's what is used in every major American sport (with slight variations such as reseeding). The 1-2-2-1, away goals, and aggregate scoring confuses casual fans enough, I don't think going with an entirely different format helps.
Congratulations for taking a bold and unwavering stance against something that will never happen that nobody has ever suggested ever.
It sure has an effect on whoever loses the play-in game. I'll bet you they wish they'd finished higher in the standings. And how, pray tell, would you enforce that "rule"? As someone pointed out, LA had the same number of wins as New England and only 6 more points. Would you keep the Galaxy out of the playoffs too? If not, why not? Just because they were consistent, while New England were either red hot or ice cold? ------RM
Congratulations on missing the intention of a post that was fairly clearly meant to offer an extreme opinion to highlight the pointlessness of MLS to NCAA basketball/football comparisons or as useful examples for analysis.
Although every analogy has its limits, comparison to NCAA championship tournaments can be quite useful in helping understand the pros and cons of various sizes of the playoff format. Just a few years ago the NCAA threw about the idea of expanding March Madness to be a 96 team tournament, and there was some serious backlash and they settled at 4 extra playoff games so the field was expanded from 64 to 68. Sounds pretty similar to the upcoming switch to 12. ***NCAA D-1 basketball has 350 + teams, so even going to 96 for them would be a far lower percentage in the tournament than 60%.
Sure, but not nearly as useful as comparisons to say the post-season formats used by LigaMX or even the NHL, NBA or NFL. (And those comparisons are also rather strained or limited, for various reasons.) The key difference with NCAA basketball/football is that there is a "committee of selection" involved for post-season involvement, and very little "direct qualification" (based primarily on the vastly different schedules that so many teams do play and are reasonably limited in playing). So in that sense, the SuperLiga was like the NCAA.
nope, its definitely at least nearly as useful as comparisons to formats used by other pro sports such as LigaMX, NHL, NBA, or NFL. Yes a selection committee is quite different, but discussing the NUMBER of teams or PERCENTAGE OF POSSIBLE TEAMS included in the postseason is not advocating a switch to a selection committee for selecting MLS playoff teams. Most bigsoccer posters are smart enough to find value in the discussion of the size of the playoffs while recognizing that a discussion about various sizes is not implying an argument to switch to a selection committee.
fwiw, here's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCAA_Men's_Division_I_Basketball_Championship#Format_history Interesting to note that tv partners help drive the push for more games/content.
I've refrained from posting in this thread, but would like to start by gloating, because I called it back here. For those who care, I subsequently posted a calculation of the base chance of teams in a six-team playoff advancing to the MLS Cup final that uses historical data on single-elimination and two-legged MLS playoff series. So, as the model shows, for those who want more home field advantage for higher seeds, the move to six teams is somewhat of an improvement on the current format. That said, it doesn't really fix the biggest problems with the format. Namely, that once a team has advanced out of the play-in round -- which is the significant disadvantage of finishing third to sixth -- their chance of advancing to the final rises dramatically. In fact, you could even argue that the format gives no advantage to any team still in the tournament once the play-in round concludes and the conference semi-final round begins. As previously mentioned in that other thread, for the past couple years, I've been maintaining a running calculation of the rates of advancing in the MLS playoffs in either a single-elimination game or two-legged series. Again, credit to @Stan Collins for pointing out that this data exists, and we don't have to keep hand-waving estimations. Updating my results for 2014, the numbers have become even more pronounced: Home teams have advanced 69.2% of the time in single-elimination matches (18 of 26 instances). Teams hosting the second leg of a two-legged aggregate series have only advanced 55.6% of the time (30 of 54 instances). The key thing to understand is that the higher rate of success for hosts of a single-elimination match has to be an almost exclusive reflection of the difference in format! This difference has been most striking since the 2011 introduction of the play-in round, and the 2012 move to a two-legged conference final. In the play-in round, the home team has won 6 of the 8 play-in games ever contested. In comparison, the host of the second leg as only ever won 2 of 6 two-legged Conference Finals! It's a very small data set, but that dichotomy is remarkable. Hosts of the second leg have fared much better in the conference semi-final round. There, they've won 28 out of 48 two-legged series since 2003. How much of that is a reflection of the format, and how much is simply a reflection of the "better-team effect" is an open question. I haven't pulled out the difference between 1 v 4 / 1 v 4/5 and 2 v 3 match-ups to see if there's a trend. But as the limited data of the two-legged conference finals era suggests, it's not impossible that hosting the second leg is a disadvantage that better teams are actually overcoming simply by virtue of being better. That is an incredibly troubling possibility, but at least the evidence suggests that it's unlikely, if not impossible. Far more likely is that there is next to no advantage and the historic results are almost entirely down to the better-team effect. But as many posters have rightly pointed out, the problem with expanding to a sixth team in each conference is not the effect of the playoffs -- which is probably, on the whole, positive -- it's the effect ON THE REGULAR SEASON. No, adding Portland or Philly would not have enhanced this years MLS Cup playoffs. But it probably wouldn't have hurt them either. Neither team showed itself to be championship caliber, and barring a fluke run likely would have been eliminated before the conference final round, but it really just would have added more inventory in the less marketable part of the playoffs. Look at the effect on the final few weeks of the regular season however. In the Western Conference, instead of a relatively exciting battle between Vancouver and Portland, that went down to the last weekend, all that Portland would have had to do is to stay ahead of the true chaff of the conference. You might argue that the battle for seedings would have provided drama but, as demonstrated, the playoff format doesn't do a lot to reward higher seeds after the play-in round, so that's relatively ephemeral itself no matter how hard MLS pushes the narrative. Lest you think the problem is the smaller number of teams in the Western Conference, have a look at the East. Yes, the playoff race would have gone down to the last week of the season instead of ending a week earlier as it actually did. But it's not that Philly would have made the playoffs that's troubling, it's that the "battle" for the final spot would have been between Philly, Toronto, and Houston. That's the reality of "keeping teams alive later into the season" by expanding the playoff spots. REALLLLLY POOR TEAMS become the focal point of your dominant narrative. And in soccer, with the possibility of draws, the likelihood is that those bad teams will collectively just keep tripping and stumbling until they effectively eliminate themselves. Yes, it's true that the relegation battle involves bad teams too, but the stakes there are so much higher that I simply don't find it comparable. Relegation, at minimum, affects a club's entire next season, and could result in years in a lower tier. Making the playoffs in last spot means adding one away game to your season, and a long-shot chance of winning a title. I'll take my own format suggestions back to You Be the Don where they belong, but I can understand the reasonable frustrations too many hardcore MLS fans have with the league. This move would not be a disaster, and it does make the top-of-the-table slightly more meaningful in the regular season, but it's not something that needs to happen, or is likely to add much to the league. A couple more not so marketable games are not worth it IMO.
Thanks for doing the work on this. I thought the conclusion would be much like yours, for the simple philosophical reason that the chance you're now giving the 6-seed comes entirely at the expense of the 3. In fact, forcing the 3 to go to a play-in should enhance the odds for the 1, 2 seeds because occasionally the 3 will slip on the banana peel to a weak team that will turn around and be a lamb to the slaughter for the 1 seed. Also, the extra game is one extra game for a guy to get hurt or suspended in. The effects won't be large, but the important thing is that it runs in the opposite direction from what most people think when they think 'more teams in the playoffs.' I don't care for it because I think it devalues the playoffs, not the regular season. First, because when GMs say to their fans, 'but we made the playoffs' the fans roll their eyes, and that's not a good thing. Second because it creates some fairly unappealing early round matchups where neither side deserves to be thought of as a 'contender' (even if the playoff format gives them a non-trivial shot). But if you're upset about the value of the regular season, you're supposed to be angry about the aggregate and away goals, not the number of teams in the playoffs, because as a simple mathematical principle the former two matter and the last one doesn't much. One could indeed design a playoff where the whole league or nearly the whole league makes the playoffs, but where the correlation between regular season finish and likelihood of winning the postseason title is higher than in MLS right now.
There was a lot of great stuff in your post, but I thought I'd expand on this last part. Right now as the league currently sits, I think most people would agree that a 6th spot per conference isn't needed. But since it's coming and it also affects the top 2 seeds, my hope is that it will push MLS organizations to strengthen their squads enough to shoot for one of those 2 spots every season. And thankfully, I don't think we're too far off from that point. The Western Conference will be tough right from the get-go next year, as you'll likely have LA, Seattle, RSL, SKC, Dallas, Portland and Vancouver in the mix. As for the East, I imagine that NYCFC and Orlando will be competitive from the start (and almost as importantly, help replace some of the star power that's leaving MLS). Then you've got New England who looks like they've built a really strong team built to contend for a few years, plus strong foundations in DC & Columbus. Depending on how the Red Bulls rebuild without Henry, the East looks like it will be fairly competitive next year as well (though obviously not as much as the West). It's obviously not perfect, but I thought the playoffs this year have been pretty exciting from a relatively neutral point of view, so I can't see that adding one more knockout game hurts the perception of a growing league.
As a TFC fan, let me concur on that point. I regularly felt insulted when the team talked about being in the playoff hunt after mid-September. I probably agree with that statement too. My big gripe is where and how MLS uses the two-legged aggregate format, not that they admit too many teams. As I admitted in the links, before this was announced I would probably say that forcing the third place team into the play-ins is, on the whole, a positive at least insofar as it creates more reward for first and second. It was simply when I looked at this year's table that I got so disheartened when imaging the counter-factual of how the end of the regular season would have played out. Edit: Though I think there might be a slight bit of semantic talking past each other. Where you suggest that you think adding a sixth team devalues the playoffs, maybe it's better to say it devalues the legitimacy of making the playoffs, which I consider part of the regular season's narrative.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I mean. I thought this last season was quite good, in that sense. The overall playoff field was about as strong as its ever been, the only team that I thought really 'backed in' was also the defending champions, and a team that had a lot of talent. (The points sheet says 2013 was better, but I tend to think that's because the teams at the bottom of the table were worse--DC United was historically bad, and even Chivas was worse in 2013 than in 2014.) 'Making the playoffs' this season wasn't a trivial accomplishment, but at the same time it wasn't over in July except for some truly bad teams. 12 out of 24 would be just as good, maybe slightly better. FWIW, Garber has claimed that the logic is so that the format can stay the same as they grow. (I'm sure that logic is eased by Univision TV money, the real reason the playoffs expanded). If there's a reason to be annoyed, is that going to 12 out of only 20 in and of itself sends the opposite signal, that it's unlikely to be 12 of 24, or at least pretty unlikely to ever be 12 out of 26 or 12 out of 30. (And there's a bit of a time-bomb coming when the number that maintains MLS's recent-historical percentages hits 16. Because then you lose the play-ins and byes that are the saving grace of the current system.)
I got the survey too. Here is what I suggested. I can't remember if I read this idea in the past or if this is all my idea, but its been in my head since I heard about 12 team playoffs. -6 teams from East & West make the Playoffs. -Wild card games - #3 plays #6, #4 plays #5. One off game, higher seed hosts. #1 and #2 get a bye. -2nd round - round robin. #1, #2, and the 2 wild card winners all play each other once. Higher seed hosts, which means the #6 won't get a home playoff game (and they don't deserve it - they were 6th!). The #1 will get 3 home games, #2 gets 2 home games, etc. -Round robin winner goes to MLS Cup Final. (haven't thought about tie breakers, but probably goal differential, away goals, etc. - can't do overtime/pks in a round robin setup) -Best regular season record team making the final hosts the final. -Whole thing would take 5 weekends. Probably an intl break in there somewhere - so maybe 6 weeks time. The pluses: + 6 teams from each conference works here. Wouldn't expand beyond this even if MLS has 24 teams. 50%+ chance of playoff is generous. + Playoff would be 5-6 weekends (not too short, not too long, doesn't go far into December) + Gives strong meaning to the regular season by giving higher seeds home game advantages, no wildcard for #1/#2, more rest. + Brings more teams into playoffs, but low seeds 3,4,5,6 really really have to prove themselves in multiple away games to prosper. Gives opportunity, but not odds. It also doesn't necessarily kill a team if they have 1 bad round robin game, and looks at a 3 game body of work. Saves most of the one off lucky game stuff for the US Open Cup and makes that more unique and a different type of competition. + Gives home teams better advance notice about round robin games and thus more time to sell tickets. Cup final would only have one week to sell, but that should be an easy quick sell. + round robin playoff format is unique for MLS. Doesn't steal from NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, or Euro leagues (as far as I'm aware). I'm too young to have witnessed it, but didn't the World Cup use a 2nd round, round robin format years ago? Thought I read that it did. The minuses -#6 seeds won't get a home playoff game & #5 might not. Can't say they deserve one for finishing 6th though. Lucky their in at all imho. Would make an incredible, defying the odds story if a #6 were to win the Cup though. - If #3 seed chokes in the one off wild card game, they're done. That might be a bit too much punishment for a #3 seed. The more I think about this, the more I like it and I can't find many minuses. Thoughts?
A couple more: - 5 weeks (excluding the international break which could be there) is a not insignificant amount of time for a league that (unlike other North American leagues) doesn't play in isolation. - A team could win its final playoff game 10-0, and yet not advance.
More minuses? Well, there's this. And this. The group stage idea gets a lot of traction from some but, no offense, I'm not sure those who advocate it really think through the absurdities it could throw up. It's like simply saying "World Cup format" prevents critical anaysis. We accept potential absurdities in the World Cup because there are 32 teams, only five or six of which are actual contenders, and if you can't navigate a group you're probably not a real contender. Further, part of the idea is just to get teams more games so they don't travel to a far off country and leave after one game after months of build-up . After a 34 game season though? Where you've already eliminated part of the field? Not needed, and likely to cause more problems than it solves, IMO.
I already hated the playoff format, now even more. Ridiculous. If we are really just looking for something for the TV partners to show, lets move on to full fledge league-cup and invite all ? Otherwise my option is= 1/ all 20-22-24 in single table (even if unbalanced) Supporters Shield still to #1. 2/ Playoffs are single elimination at higher seed (45/45/15/15/pk)- 3/ Take top 16 like NBA,NHL- top 8 in league get a home game in the first round- share the wealth. 4/ 4 rounds, all games on Saturdays or maybe 1 on Friday, and split rest on Sat or Sun to spread TV coverage.
Three years in, and the home team is still undefeated in the MLS Cup. If that isn't an incentive to claw your way up the standings, I don't know what is. ------RM
Only matters if you can get there. And since the system doesn't do much to reward teams before that... (It's worth pointing out that as no SS winner has actually ended up hosting the final, it's a pretty facile argument to suggest that it's much of an incentive.)
"Sure, we'd like to have a better chance to host the championship game, but since we probably won't make it anyway, why should we care?" -- No Coach Ever ------RM
"We're buying tickets to the game tonight. I've got lots of other stuff going on, but we've got a chance to improve our seed for the playoffs if we win." - a few fans