The All-Encompassing Pro/Rel Thread on Soccer in the USA

I don't think it will ever happen in the Prem but other British sports use playoffs to determine their champion.

Rugby went back and forth but now the Grand (playoff) Final is the highlight of the Super League season.

Salford played St Helens last year in front of a crowd of 64,000, 13,000 higher than their aggregate home attendance for the entire season.

 

Plenty of unpredictability without having a serious injury during playoffs wreck a team’s chances of being champion.

 

As long as the rules are agreed upon before the competition starts, I don't really see the issue with playoffs. It just changes a team strategy for building their squad/winning the championship.

It's probably a necessary format in the U.S., though. Beneath D1, it's hard to imagine the economic viability of fully national leagues (L1 and NISA are just trying to get enough teams to break up regionally), so balanced schedules at those levels shouldn't be encouraged, and MLS has already expanded too far to not have some kind of playoff.

 

Without pro/rel and credible confederation tournaments to qualify for, it's pretty much a necessity.

 

Interesting. Don't know enough about the structure of Nebraska HS sports to know if it would solve the problems but intriguing.

 

Well the issue with playoffs is you make the regular season less important. Without playoffs every game in the regular season could have a direct primary connection to the title. In a playoff format it's secondary because it's only impacting playoff qualification.

I am not saying I am against playoffs, and personally I think MLS should continue them.

 

Not every game. Only games involving teams at or near first place.

 

In closed leagues. Not so in pro/rel leagues.

 

I see this repeated a lot, but I’m not sure that it has any actual validity (or that it’s not actually a criticism of specific playoff formats e.g. MLS, NBA, and NHL).

The regular season absolutely matters in baseball or college football.

They aren’t mutually exclusive, but I do think they work best when playoff berths are, well, exclusive.

 

My statement stands for pro/rel leagues. In pro/rel leagues, only the games involving teams at or near first place have "a direct primary connection to the title." Other games might affect pro/rel, but not the title.

 

Ok, fair enough, but you didn't specify "title" in your response, nor did the part of the post you quoted. But it's good to see you implicitly acknowledge that pro/rel adds another dimension of interest that's absent in closed leagues.

 

14 teams out of 30 isn't that much different to 6/16 Greece and Belgium.

It depends what the criteria is for the post-season. Home advantage is a great incentive to finish as high as possible.

 

But, as I previously pointed out to you, Belgium doesn't completely discard regular season points in its title playoff. An illustration that it's not just about number of teams.

Edit: I see that in Greece "All points accumulated in the regular season will transfer over to the playoffs and playouts." So really you can't compare this to MLS's oversized playoffs.

 

Plus they play a full home and away match competition.

 

Surely that makes the regular season less important.

 

Why? You have to be in a certain spot to make the play off, so the regular season still makes itself count. Especially (in the Belgian case, I've no clue about elsewhere) as half (iirc)the points you won you take with you into the play off. So in the regular competition you already build an advantage or disadavantage going into the play off. You donot start the play off with a clean sheet.

 

It might make the concept of having a playoff less needed than when you have an unbalanced schedule, but, given half or all points carry over to the playoffs, it surely makes each individual regular season game more important.

Edit: I see feyenoord beat me to it...

 

Never said they make the regular seasons meaningless, but they reduce the importance of the regular season by shifting the most important games to the playoffs.

Now that could be seen as a good thing, and from a marketing standpoint it is undoubted a good thing to have a your most important game(s) on predetermined dates.

And obviously the bigger the playoffs the less important the regular season is and vice a versa.

 

I think in general it's a good idea. I've been saying (and been made fun of for it ) that D1 college football should adopt pro/rel for conferences. I know it will never happen and why it won't happen but I think it would be great for fans of the sport.

I haven't been heavily involved in local HS sports since I was in HS but I do follow it some and know there has been constant realignment in our local section to try and make sure you have schools with similar resources and ambitions playing each other. So seems reasonable that this is a space where pro/rel could help.