Recently, people have observed that TFC has played a lot of games.

I wanted to quantify this schedule congestion. I examined the schedules of all teams in the eastern division, recording how many "days of rest" teams had between games (I know they practice and travel on those days, so it's not all rest... can be considered non-game days for lack of a better word). I included all matches teams played -- friendlies, US Open Cup games, and NCC games etc.

Here are the results (sorted by highest average days off):

Crew---- 5.05
Dc------ 4.89
Houston- 4.78
NE------ 4.57
Philly---- 4.50
KC------ 4.38
Fire----- 4.33
NY------ 4.33
TFC----- 3.67

What to make of this?

1) There's no direct or exact correlation between rest and standings
2) But most teams are relatively close in days off, except for TFC, so strong correlation probably would be hard to find.
3) The Crew have had the least congested schedule so far; TFC has had by far the most congested schedule -- I mean there must be some benefit for the Crew to have a day and a half more between games than TFC
4) I don't have all the injury lists for the eastern terms, but TFC seems to have suffered a great deal of injuries this season -- I wonder if it has anything to do with the fixture congestion? Trainers will tell you that when you play so much and don't recover, you can get more easily injured.

TFC's league schedule is much easier the rest of the season (a quick glance and it looks like close to 6 days off between games later in the season). If we make the group stage of the CCL, however, that advantage is reduced.

In the future I'd like to see the FO refrain from frontloading league games because we're always going to have the NCC to play in. We need a better balance -- the team is just shooting itself in the foot by having to play more games than anybody else. It also didn't help to have a rebuilding team with a new coach and little depth dealing with fixture congestion.

Thoughts?