agreed. it would be "easier" for the higher seeds to beat the lower seeds if there were some real and guaranteed HF advantage built into the playoff system. right now the H/A systerm used by MLS basically puts all 8 teams on equal footing (for the first round, at least).
Maybe it shouldn't be easy. "If it was easy, everybody would do it," as my dad used to say. If you want a real test, don't grease the skids. I can see where some would say "Well, why play the season, then, if you're not going to give Chicago less of an advantage than DC?" Which makes sense. You could also say "Shut up and play, prove that you're the best, take your place in history." For the record, I'm still in favor of one-offs all the way through. But I understand the objections to that, too (as the objections to any format you can name). But if you want a clear advantage (whether you take advantage of that edge or not), a one-off at home to me seems to offer that. Then, of course, you have the quirk of fate, the Troy Dayaks and the referee decisions that can have much more impact on the outcome of a one-game soccer playoff.
agreed completely. but the "strange/disappointing" part of the MLS H/A playoff is that those first round games are played on "equal footing". there is not HF advantage for the higher seed (not in the first 180 minutes anyway). i would like to see a system that added to the HF (games)/advantage for the higher seeded teams, and limited or eliminated the HF (games)/advantage for the lower seeds. right now, there is too much equality (leveling of the playing field) in the first round of the current system, and the seeding doesn't "earn" a team any real/guaranteed HF advantage or disadvantage.
I would quibble with your final sentence, if you are including data from 2003 and 2004. In those years, the average lower-seeded first-round team was worse than the average overall MLS team. That is, the average of teams 5-8 out of 10 would have been ranked "6.5", while the average opponent of any team during the regular season would have been ranked "5.5".
Onionsack made a great point early in the thread and I think it's been glossed over a little: seeding and home field are separate types of rewards. To which I'll add: seeding in MLS appears to be a bigger advantage than seeding and HF in other American sports leagues. But lots of folks here seem stuck on home field. Why is this? I think it's because home field advantage embodies different values from seeding. Seeding entitles you to the right to play a crappy team. It doesn't do anything, however, to tip the odds in your favor. The odds are already good. But this doesn't protect a strong, but faltering DC United at all against a Chicago Fire team that really is no longer a crappy team. This is similar to March Madness. Home field tips things in your favor regardless of what vagaries of seeding there are. It eliminates the "error" of having the Chicago Fire as a 7 seed, when really the Fire are playing more like a 2-4 seed. This is what the NFL does.
i do want a real test. but i want the "test" to include some of the work the teams did during the regular season. that's why i think the skids should be greased in the post-season for the higher seeds (and it should be an uphill battle on the road for the lower seeds -- again see that Group Stage thread over in MLS General). since you can see my arguments, and i think they are very good ones, than i'll just restate that you are correct that i would say something liike "Well, why play the season, then, if you're not going to give the lower seeds less of an advantage than the higher seeds?" don't all playoffs (in this country) weight some kind of advantage to the teams that performed better in the regular season? don't we want to add incentives to the regular season? i could say that, if i agreed 100% with that sentiment. but i'd probably try to pharse it in less-harsh and more encouraging language. one-offs all the way through would be fine an dandy (if not perfect). but i don't think the MLS BoG would be too keen on that idea (just yet), given how they like to try to make money by selling playoff tickets. one-offs all the way through would be the way to go, if the league weren't so intent on trying to rake in playoff money by having some "bare minimum" of games.
In terms of HFA your probably right, that the advantage in that regard is marginal at best, non-existant at worst. But, IMO the first roud has never been about HFA in any real sense. I am part of the camp that thinks playing the second leg at home is slight advantage. Its always been about Seeding in the practical sense. So far the trands tend to show in the first round higher seeds on average advance. As long as that trend hold at the 2003-2006 levels then i find it to be advantagous enough. If it doesn't or if we see wild varibility from season to season then i would gladly re-evaulate my position and send an appoligy letter to Davis acknowldging his foresight. If we want HFA, we either make all games one offs at higher seed homes or add an artifical HFA like the FMF Rule to the two leg series. In fact i would say that no one really questions the logic of seeding, its heavily supported in all sports that use it. Its a HFA question and the precption that it doesn't exisit and MLS trys to say it does? So the Question should be: Should MLS change the rules of the current format to allow HFA in all playoff rounds either real or artifical? If so, what is the best way to achieve that while respecting all the factors both on and off the field that the league must respond to?
Sure, I understand how it works today. And I can accept that, today, playoffs don't necessarily determine the best team, over the course of the season, or even at the end of the season. And I understand that there may be business reasons for doing one thing or the other. But I thought we were discussing what, in the perfect world, we'd like to see, purely as fans of the game. Are we not allowed to talk about that here? We can talk about what we think MLS is going to do, or even what we think we'd like them to do from a business perspective. But that's a different conversation. When you write "What we want doesn't factor into it", what is "it"?
Good point-- I hadn't thought of that. The right statement is that high seeds are getting results at a better rate than they get results during the regular season. For the highest seeds, that might be attributable to player lesser teams in the postseason.
At least not a perceived one. As we've gone over, we don't know how much of it is that it IS an advantage to be at home for the second leg (whether you call it "knowing exactly what you need to do" or "surviving the first leg and then winning the second" or whatever) and how much of it is due to the quality of the team hosting the second leg. The European data (wish I could find it) would seem to suggest it's the latter rather than the former. But right now, I'm not sure we can say definitively "there's no home-field advantage for the higher seed in hosting the second leg of a home and home in a playoff situation where the teams are seeded." We can say that on paper, it doesn't seem to be as much of an "reward" as you'd like to see for a team that wins the regular-season title, but since when is life all about rewards? Go grab it. Beat Chicago. Beat New England. Beat Chivas or Houston. Then put the fifth star on your shirt - you'll have earned it. I wouldn't say "eliminated," because at some point, you reach a point where your playoffs aren't worth watching because you've made the lower seed's route too hard. (Boo hoo, I know, right?) But, seriously, there does come a point at which you're better off not inviting the lower seeds. I don't know where that point is, exactly, though. In a league with parity and equality as a mantra. Imagine that.
Well technically your statement is incorrect. 1. The fact there are seeds is a revelant advantage. 2. Lower seeds even if they advance must then also win a one off game away against a higher seeded team. As for the higher seed.. the #1. They get to play the worst qualifier H/A in their conferene (i think it should be league wide) then get the right to play a one off at home to go to the final. We can argue about the weight of that advanatge, and we do, but you can not expect rational discussion when your statement is wrong on it's face. You are doing exactly what Davis did in his article when he said seeding is totaly irrelevant. It is, you just disagree on the weight of the advantage.
Fair enough. The problem comes in reaching a consensus on how much of that work is too much to include. There we run into the "are we an American sports league or are we a soccer league?" conundrum. Do we want to echo the conventions of American sports leagues (playoffs aren't solely an American thing, but it's the way we do things from high school to the NFL) or do we want to be a soccer league. If it's the latter, we're kind of in uncharted territory since the "rest of the world," by and large, doesn't use them to determine their league champion. And I don't think coaches and GMs would be in favor of it, either. Trying to build a consensus when you have (often radically) different agendas among the decision-makers is never easy. I don't know why fans expect it to be.
The only way that data would be directly analogous is if you get the data pre- away goal rule. That small rule has an effect on how the H/A in Europe plays out.
Oh, okay. Well, carry on, then. I'm just being the killjoy. Okay. So it's more of an abstract discussion, then. I've been having a slightly more realistic one. Sorry. "It" is "how things are actually done." You may want the champion to be the best team over the course of April to November. But that's simply not always the case. You may want the champion to be the team that plays its best over the last third of the season. That's not always the case. I may want the ACC basketball champion to be the team that plays best from December to February, but the fact is, the ACC champ is the winner of the tournament they play in early March. There's what you want and there's what is. They're not always the same thing.
good points. and in MLS, aren't all the teams (or at least usually within the group of the top 8) usually just about equally crappy or non-crappy? seeding doesn't do much in MLS, as the part where it "entitles you to the right to play a crappy team" (or at least one that didn't do as well in the regular season as you did). The HF factor needs to be weighted in the playoffs for the higher seeds (imo) because the "lower" seeds aren't really of significantly "lower" quality, and in a sport like soccer, the differences on the scoreboard are usually tiny and a result of who knows what. HF advantage should be a bigger part of the MLS playoffs, to reward those team that had "better" regular seasons than the lower seeds.
When did they institute that? My thought is that long ago, home field advantage may have been even larger than it is today, because of travel logistics and other things. The road team may have had it even tougher than normal back in the day (I'm talking about in the 40s and 50s) when it took you most of a day or days to get somewhere (like the teams that took ships to the 1950 World Cup) and you didn't have a nice hotel or training ground and got pelted with rocks and garbage on your way out. You know, kind of like South America today.
Tab, I think you're off there. The data, such as it is, shows that seeding is a bigger advantage than HF+seeding in the NFL or MLB. MLS already has a comparatively very high rate of advancement. This is not intuitive and it's not what I expected, but it is, as far as we can know, the truth.
right. and my take is that all of the regular season work/results should be a large determining factor in who gets more home games/advantage in the post season. the MLS Cup still goes to the team that "wins" the playoff, but those playoffs should be "weighted" to include an advantage (let's use the idea of more home games) for those teams that did more "winnning" in the regular season. the H/A system does an ok job (once we get past the complete fairness and a level playing field within the first 180 minutes of the first round) of rewarding higher seeds with a HF advantage. but i do think that there are other playoff formats out there that can be configured to build in a nice form of HF advantage from the opening whistle of the playoffs.
one could argue that there is far more parity within MLS than there is within the NFL or MLB. i would suspect that the "higher seeds" in those other leagues are much more likely to be the superior team when compared to their playoff opponent, regardless of playing games at home or away (and an NFL playoff team never plays on the road if it is the higher seed -- so i'm not sure how there can be a difference between the seeding and HF+seeding because those are one and the same in the NFL). i don't think there's a "truth" to MLS, its playoffs and its patterns yet. the league is so young and the playoff formats have been so often short-lived, that I don't feel the MLS post-season data is anywhere close to stable or "accurate" yet. maybe i'm wrong. but i'm just not certain how data from the sports of American football and baseball can be applied to soccer/MLS. the sports (and scoring systems and what "decides/determines" a game or series and its winner) are too divergent to be of much use for an analysis of what MLS can or perhaps shouldn't do for its post-season.
Forever. Honestly, i know it was in play in the 70's. I think somewhere around the late 60's and early 70's But i can't remeber exactly.
You can use seeding in other sports as cirrcumstancial evidence, of course its never a direct authority but its informative in the proper context. Based on what we have so far with MLS and using the cirrcumstantial evidence of seeding formats in other sports we can make reasonable assumptions about the seeding format in MLS. That assumption is that the higher seed should reach advancment somewhere between 60-70%. However, in other seeding formats the advancment & of #1 is high and the % decreases gradually as you aproach the 4 v 5 matchup with is a statistcal toss up.
Yep. I'll guess I'll just register my "what I want" vote one more time, with some rationale, and I think I've added all I can add to this thread. 1) Single table for regular season: This is a reasonably good measure of "the best team" over the course of the season. 2) MLS Cup tournament at the end, with 8 or so teams, current setup is OK: I don't believe that you can determine "best team", even at the end of the season, with a short tournament like this. Don't worry too much about how the regular season should affect the format. The regular season champion has already been determined. This is to determine the MLS Cup tournament champion. You get an invitation if you're one of the top 8. Incent the players with good prize money, and have fun. So really what I'm proposing is not that different from what MLS has today, with the exception of merging of conferences and an elevated status of Supporter's Shield (i.e. regular season winner) to "regular season champion".
Question... Let's suppose we were able to fast forward 5-10 years and found that Paulsons data turned-out to be dead on correct. Would that be something that would change your mind or would you still perfer one-offs and more heavily weighted HF advantage?
Sure-- and I think that's true-- but MLS low seed playoff teams are also worse than NFL low seed playoff teams. A number 1 seed in MLS is frequently rewarded with playing a team with a losing record. It could theoretically happen in the NFL or MLB, but it's rare that it's even a possibility. That's fair-- if you think the data's not ready for consumption yet, then about all we can do is discuss the general concepts. There's only one thing that matters ultimately: how often a higher seed advances. That is completely comparable across leagues. If you want to know what a "good" level of high seed advantage is, then there's no reason you can't look to a league where teams are considered to have a big advantage (like the NFL). As it stands, if MLS made it even harder for the low seeds to advance, you'd be looking at, by far, the hardest system in American professional sports for low seeds. At some point, it's actually counterproductive to making the regular season meaningful for everyone.
Maybe worse relative to their league. But there's no way to determine if an MLS low seed team is a worse team than an NFL low seed playoff team. And it may also be that the margin between bad and good and decent, on the day or over the long haul, is so completely different in soccer because of the nature and setup of the game that such comparisons are not worth so much.