I'm not necessarily a fan of the proposed format, but technically if you have the 2/5 and 3/4 matches on Wednesday/Thursday and the winners playing on Sunday, the top seed would only have a week off between the end of the regular season and the start of the conference championship. Now would having a week off while their opponent plays and survives two must win games be an advantage or disadvantage?
Any team on their 3rd match in 7 days will be at a disadvantage. You get either the lay off issue, or the overplay issue with this.
I like this playoff format. You need to give something more to the conference winner than just the 2nd game being away. Have the 2/5, 3/4 and conference finals be a two leg series. Play the games on Wed/Thurs and Sat/Sun for both the semi's and conference finals. Have MLS Cup a one-off hosted by the highest point total team. It would take 5 games to win the cup. I think that makes sense.
I think I am missing something in your proposal. As I understand things: 2/5 and 3/4 rounds (2 games) 2/5 winner vs 3/4 winner (2 games) Conference Finals (2 games) MLS Cup (1 game) If a first place team makes it to the final, they play three games. If a 2nd through 5th place team makes the final, they play 7 games. There is, again I may be missing something, no way for a team to only play five games. A team's fifth game would be the first leg of the conference finals for a 2/3/4/5 team. Also, would a first place team really want to sit for at least two weeks waiting for the other four teams to settle things?
You have them doubled. Its 3 games for the conf. winners and 5 for everyone else. They would also only be resting one week.
So the quoted sentence does not mean what it says it means? I do understand if there was a simple typo though, nobody's perfect.
How about letting them play the worst team in the playoffs who just had to play in a must-win game 3 days earlier?
Well that is an advantage. Since MLS, MLB, and at one time the NFL all have or had the same format (once qualifying was over anyway), there must be something to the idea. But I would argue that letting the best team in the conference go right to the conference finals could make finishing first have some real meaning in the playoffs. If you prefer, we could go with my 10 team playoff format which has long been popular in Australian sport, if not in Australian soccer. Throw in the Mexican tiebreaker (higher seed goes on in a tie) and you have real teeth to the regular season. Match Day I Game 1: 2nd Place hosts 3rd Place Game2: 4th Place hosts 5th Place Match Day II Game 3: 1st Place hosts Game 1 Winner Game 4: Game 1 Loser hosts Game 2 Winner Match Day III Game 5: Game 3 Loser hosts Game 4 Winner Match Day IV Game 6: Game 3 Winner hosts Game 5 Winner Teams have the following advantages: 1st Place: Two home games, can lose once before conference final 2nd Place: Two home games, can lose once before conference final 3rd Place: Only one home game, but can still afford a loss before the conference final 4th Place: Gets a home game, but must win 4 straight to take the conference 5th Place: Must win 4 straight sudden death games If you throw in the Higher Seed Wins in a Tie rule (which is really not necessary here), the 1st place team is two straight draws from the MLS Cup Final while the 5th place team must win 4 straight games on the road without the luxury of taking even one match to extra time. Every team would need to beat (in 90 minutes with no extra time) every team who finished above them to make it to final while every team would probably want to go all out to finish as high as they can. As even greater bonus (at least for the educated soccer fan), every second of all six games has one team needing to score and one team in the lead. Yeah some teams may bunker, but there would never be a time when both teams are playing for a better position in the second game of the series or to just get to penalties.
Nowhere to really stick this, but the comments about MLS clubs scheduling friendlies in the middle of the season against Euro clubs has been sharted all over the place by people looking to take shots at the league. Well, this: http://www.impactmontreal.com/en/news/2012/11/preview-impact-takes-bologna-fc-friendly-thursday
Last night was a prime example at why a winter schedule will never happen here in the States and Canada.
Not really. It was a great example of why I'd prefer having the most important games, playoff games, played in the lovely weather in May rather than having the possibility of dealing with this type of weather every november. The LAG/NY 1st leg was also effected last year by what snow had done to the pitch. A different schedule with a winter break could work, with the most important games in better weather. Yesterday did nothing to disprove that. It's just a question of if you're in favor of it or not.
Rather only have to reschedule one playoff game with the current schedule then have to reschedule 10-12 games with a winter schedule and have a congested 2nd half of the season.
Not to argue for moving to a winter schedule or anything, but if MLS played more regularly in winter weather, the league would be better at dealing with it when it happened, rather than running around like a bunch of dipshits without a clue in the world about how to run a league. Anyway, I'm not convinced weather is the number 1 reason to avoid the winter schedule. Look at TV ratings this year; they nose-dived after the summer ended. MLS has a nice thing going in the relatively uncrowded summer months. If/when MLS becomes really popular, and if there's a really good reason to move, MLS could handle a winter schedule pretty easily.
Well, then you get into when exactly a break would be, how long, and do northern teams play their first 2-3 games in warmer weather cities. If it was planned for and MLS was completely behind it, I'd be hopeful we wouldn't see 10-12 games cancelled. That's an assumption at this point without even knowing what the hell the dates of a different schedule would be. I'd stil rather see regular season games subject to change than playoff games, the most important of the year.
I think it could as well. that doesn't mean I'm putting a time frame on it or anything, jsut saying last night certainly doesn't prove a different schedule wouldn't work. We'll have to deal with poor weather anyway. That's not changing. Question is do you prefer it affecting playoff games or regular season games? Some years we might not have an issue at all in Nov. Others, I mean what if NY, NE, Philly and DCU all made the playoffs? If there's bad winter weather multiple matchups could be effected. There's also the issue of do you want the most important games possibly being decided in conditions which aren't favorable to quality and your team being able to do what got it here in the first place. If NY/DCU did go on yesterday, given the conditions would it really have been the best team moving on? Is it fair to the players to have a win or go home game in those conditions? I'd be pissed for example if our season ended because a defender lost his footing in 3" of snow.
Russia/USSR has been using the "we aren't ready to play good soccer in February/March" as an excuse to why their teams have underperformed - relative to high rankings for their national team - in the UEFA events for as long as I can remember. Well, they don't have that much UEFA success playing the Fall-to-Spring schedule either.
MLS looked bad the other night. Why did it take so long to cancel? And if they wanted to cancel the game they should have done so earlier. They knew that winter storm was coming.
how big of a sample size is this Russia "Fall-to-Spring" "UEFA (not much) success" analysis? Isn't this the first season that Russia plays their domestic season concurrent to their CL season? either way, there are far more UEFA countries (no matter when they run their domestic leagues) that don't have much "UEFA club competition success" relative to the small handful of "big" nations that tend to regularly dominate those competitions.
Russia has/had the "same" problem as MLS. If its clubs qualified for the spring portion of the UEFA competitions, they had to play the first series before their regular round-robin championship - sometimes the Cup began earlier - began in mid-late March-early April. It seems that this season, with the exception of Hiddink's Anzhi, Russian clubs aren't looking too good in the Fall either. The Ukrainian teams, on the same Fall-Spring+Long Winter Break schedule as the RPL, have done tons better and mostly on smaller budgets to boot. Given the quality of the Russian team rosters and the money invested in them, much more was expected.
The Russian Premier League just canceled its mid-December schedule and will play these matches in March, 2013 instead. Too freaking cold in Moscow, you see. Who would have thunk?!
My first reaction was that Global Warming will take care of that in a few years. My second reaction was to wonder why no one thinks of the children who will be harmed by this perversion of the game of canceling a month of football. My third (and clearest) reaction is to ask simply and directly: Name one good reason why MLS should follow Russia's lead and switch to a winter schedule JUST BECAUSE?