At the end of week 20 The REDS are holding onto the final MLS Playoff Spot!
Making NYRB...HUGE!!
settingthetable
Setting the table- Week 20 TFC 8th!
At the end of week 20 The REDS are holding onto the final MLS Playoff Spot!
Making NYRB...HUGE!!
settingthetable
Last edited by denime; 08-10-2008 at 09:10 PM.
Still a super tight race, even with NE and the Crew out in front. Hopefully we can pull it together over the last half.
PLS PLS PLS make the playoffs. Can I have 1 Toronto team be good?
I f*cking love single table.
It's such a clear and concise summary of what's actually going on.
FFS Garber...sort this shit out.
^agree. the league should be a single table.
As much as I prefer the single table, I do agree that we have a slightly different geography and population distro than Euro nations. Unless you could find a way to balance the travel, a home and away schedule will be biased to the Eastern teams.Originally Posted by profit89
I do want a single table, I just recognise that it is harder to implement and simply adjusting the schedule.
keep the scheduling the same as now. but just have a single table. not hard
you can't keep the schedule the same and have a single table because its unbalanced. do you really want to have a single table yet not play the weaker west teams as much as the stronger eastern teams? the only way a single table works is if you play home and away, and we don't have enough teams for this yet. when we get to 16 teams, i think this should be looked at though.
Amen
absolutely correct. Single Table does not work unless you play a perfectly balanced schedule
If/When this league goes to 20 teams, two conferences with 10 teams each will be just dandy. 4 teams from each conference go through to the playoffs. This will make the regular season very important, as opposed to right now, where teams like TFC can shit the bed for a month and still be in the playoff race.
that most definitely isn't far, even less fair than the west doing more travel.
The league probably could never adopt the home/away alternation either -- which creates further complications in scheduling in a single table.
If you can get 20 teams, and balance the distance, then you could do a single table. It is just damn tricky in North America when the land mass is so huge.
I am all for fewer teams in the playoffs too, it is too easy right now. Perhaps add in a season long tourny for everyone, just because I think every team and their fans should participate in a tourny. But make the playoffs the cream of the crop and short.
regarding the distance question, the MLS setting the table site discussed this in April:
http://www.settingthetable.info/simp...th=4&year=2008
he concludes:
San Jose's current away schedule has them traveling an estimated 43,000 miles in 2008. If they went single table in 2010 with the same number of games, they would fly just 3,000 more miles than they do now — roughly a trip to Houston and back.
The same held true for Chicago (27,200 vs 29,600), Chivas (40,150 vs. 43,800 — and that includes two "away" games currently against LA) and Colorado (29,220 vs. 31,400).
Even DC United — in that northeast corridor with close neighbors New York, New England and Philly — would only have 3,000 more miles traveled in a single table (32,700 vs. 35,600).
Yes, going single table would be more travel, but not by as much as was to have been believed.
Agree. And you would more than make up for the extra added cost by giving the league more legitimacy, thereby attracting more fans to MLS.
i'm not sure why you think the league would be more 'legitimate' due to having a single table home and away. could you explain that.
i like divisions if they are separate and teams meet in the playoffs after having not played each other... but if we're gonna decide the playoff order by total points, then it has to be a balanced schedule. It seems weird to decide it on total points when each division doesn't play each other equally. FCD could finish a point up on TFC, grab the 8th spot, yet they didn't play the same teams TFC did (TFC has to play tougher eastern teams a bit more often).
i'm amazed that with the past couple weeks we've had (1 win 7 MLS games) we still even hold a playoff spot. hopefully it stays that way.
wow thats tight
Newsflash-More countries believe our league to be a joke than not. The structure of the league has a lot to do with it. One of the main challenges in getting great foreign talent here, domestic talent to stay, and domestic fans of the game to watch MLS 10 miles away instead of or as well as the more "legitimate" leagues.
So yes I want a single table. It can be done a little differently but it's up to the league to see it as a priority.
IT. CANNOT. HAPPEN.
It's being done for a reason. Are players supposed to be traveling from coast to coast more often? Any idea how much more that is going to cost a league that's still trying to find its feet? Not to mention is hazardous for players as well. Two tables make for better playoff games anyway. And of course, better for the environment!
THIS IS NOT EUROPE! Two conferences are just fine with me.
Yep because we all know the leafs are terrible, the raps and jays are alright ....but I dont even pay attention tot he leafs nymore, its such a croc of an organization...i feel sorry for leaf fans, i never wa sone, nor never will be ....go flames.....
Oh and the red bulls are shiite and this is a huge game coming up!!!
If you bothered to read the thread, you would have seen it's a matter of one extra trip on average for all the teams involved. Hardly a difference.
huh?
soccer specific stadiums with grass, a larger salary cap, and quality refs bring legitimacy, not a single table.
Believe it or not, but people do see it as part of the problem. They see it as 'North Americanized' way of running the league. That's straight from friends abroad who think it's more important than the real grass and salary cap (which they didn't know about until I told them).
thats just eurocentric snobbish bullshit
fine, if this league is not legitimate because we don't have a single table, then we aren't legitimate. i couldn't give a fuck.
see the quote I posted above when someone from the Setting the Table blog calculated the travel distances of teams.
It's not that big of a deal in terms of added travel. MLS teams are always going to be travelling. As long as expansion occurs between east and west geographically, the problem is mitigated.
secondly, as they expand, they can do away with the extra in-division games and devote the travel distance saved on those 4 games to playing the expansion sides.
For example, with Seattle and Philly in the league by 2010, you have 16 teams.
They already, in 2008, play home and away with every team in the league for 26 games, with 4 added in-division games (this year it's Columbus, DC, KC, and NY that TFC plays an extra game against).
With Seattle and Philly, you can remove those 4 "in division" games that unbalance the competition (since there's 6 other teams in your division, but you only play 4 of them a third time and that means there's no home/away equality among those teams), and replace them with 4 home and away games with Seattle and Philly. That gives you a total of 30 league games, just like 2008. And you can make it single table since everything is balanced.
for me this has nothing to do with being like Europe, but creating clarity. it's hard to figure out who is in the playoffs right now since MLS only posts the standings by division. and they can't have an 8-team playoff system based on points in an unbalanced schedule. it's patently unfair.
Last edited by rocker; 08-11-2008 at 11:43 AM.
fine, and I'm a eurosnob.
moving on, anybody else hear of part time supporters in any NA sports that "tune in if they make the play-offs"?
And would Scotlands "table split" help the issue we're talking about the imparity between the MLS divisions?
100% agree.
MLS doesn't like single table and clarity,for many reasons one of them is LA Galaxy.
As long players signing the contract with MLS and MLS owns certain % of every club,there is no legitimacy.It is all about $$$ and thats why rules are changing so often.Since LAG missed playoffs last year,MLS changed the rules to protect their investment and make it easier for certain teams in west Conf. to make playoffs.
Single table would be a first step for MLS to get recognized around the world and eventually get better younger players to stay in MLS.
The way it is,MLS can make favorable schedule for one or two teams and make their way to playoffs much easier from the beginning.
so true.
Last edited by denime; 08-11-2008 at 12:07 PM.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Great love does not exist without joy and without great suffering ,that's why One club is worth only as much as its fans !