Belief System
The front pages of Salt Lake City’s major newspapers this morning, hours after Real Salt Lake became the second #8 seed in history to win MLS Cup:
Was it the greatest game ever? No. Finals rarely are. LA had the better of things early, but Real hung in there again, and Cup MVP Nick Rimando came up huge in the penalty kick shootout (more than you can say for league MVP Landon Donovan).
I don’t even have to look to know that two things are being discussed this morning among the rabble:
- That a playoff system that lets an eighth-place team that finished below .500 in the regular season be crowned “champions” is inherently flawed; and
- That penalties are no way to decide a title.
My responses to these are:
- As soon as the 5th-seeded New York Giants, 13th-best-record-in-the-majors 2006 St. Louis Cardinals and 1938 Chicago Blackhawks give back their Super Bowl, World Series and Stanley Cup titles, respectively, you can have that point. This is how we do things in America. Sorry about your luck. Now shut up.
- As soon as you come up with a workable idea, let us know. Play ’til someone drops? People nearly did last night. You don’t want your title decided on penalties, but you’d like to have it decided because someone just collapsed and made a mistake and that led to a fluky game-winning goal? Okay, then. If there was a better solution, we’d have found it by now. What it basically comes down to is that people (I’m sure it’s not just soccer people) want stuff that they can’t handle emotionally legislated away. This is the game. This is what it is. This is how it works. Los Angeles (and, last week, Chicago) each had 120 minutes to put Salt Lake away, and Supporters Shield winner Columbus had 180 minutes to do it - none of them could. The fact that the MLS champion is decided by who comes out on top in a four-week tournament in October and November rather than the 30-game season from March to October? Well, that’s just the way it is, boys and girls. The rules are the same for everybody. Now shut up.
You know what my reaction to this was? “Good for them.” Then I checked to see if Jason Kreis was going to be insufferable (he was) and then I went to bed.
Really, it’s that simple. Someone won, someone lost. Someone always wins and someone always loses. If you want a 100% guarantee of a happy ending, see a Disney movie. If you want a 100% guarantee of the ending you want, write a book.
Congrats, RSL. You earned it.
November 23rd, 2009 at 11:08 am
Nice of the papers to actually send writers and photogs to Seattle instead of just using the wires. Go figure — newspapers actually spending money to get good, local coverage.
Hope the SLT got around to filling in those puffs, though.
November 23rd, 2009 at 11:12 am
They probably transmitted the image to newseum.org quickly. I would hope it didn’t hit the street that way.
November 23rd, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Sure, it is too bad that you need this sort of artificial contest to settle things but it doesn’t seem to be hurting college football with a system just as phony.
The shootout does create a nice tension, and you have to settle these things somehow. The 7 OT games from college soccer in years gone by were useless.
The NASL and early MLS actually used a better system. Put the ball at the top of the D (or a little further) and give the shooter a few seconds to shoot with the keeper rushing at him. When you need to break a tie it is a better system.
I would say that you could give teams one more sub for the overtime. That would give you a bit of a chance to prove more team depth.
November 23rd, 2009 at 2:47 pm
That would be a FIFA thing, wouldn’t it? They’d have to allow the extra sub or allow MLS to experiment with it.
Yeah, the shootout. Right on!
November 24th, 2009 at 10:25 am
I got to watch the PKs in person and they were at the end where we were sitting. Yes, it was high drama and I’m glad I was there, but it’s not the best way to decide a game.
The shootout is great, but since it was invented by us barbarian Americans, it’ll never get adopted. I like adopting the college football system for soccer: Instead of first and 10 at the opponent’s 25, let the attacking team set up for a corner kick or even a free kick wherever they choose outside the penalty area. (If it goes long enough, start allowing indirect free kicks inside the penalty area.)
Then play until a) there’s a goal, b) the attacking team knocks the ball out of bounds, or c) the defensive team clears it past midfield. Either bring the attacking team’s keeper up as an 11th attacker or let the teams swap players in and out with the keeper. Give each team at least one shot. Works for me.
But other than that, the rest of your column is spot on. Don’t like RSL winning the title? Well, not one, not two, but three other teams better than them during the regular season had a chance to beat them and failed. End of story.
November 24th, 2009 at 10:28 am
You know corner kicks score <2% of the time, right?
So…penalties aren’t the best way…but someone could take a corner kick, it goes off somebody’s head and out of play over the end line…then what? The other team does it….and it gets cleared to the side…so you do it again? Until, finally, a defender just whales it down the field and there’s your champion?
Okay, got it.
November 24th, 2009 at 11:48 am
One more thing: The rabble might think this makes MLS a laughingstock. As usual, they’re wrong. This actually sends a great message out to the rest of the world: We’re not going to fall prostrate over a big name. Want another trophy, Spice Boy? Then beat us. Oh, you can’t do that? Well, sucks to be you, then.
In a world where the Old Firm has strangled Scottish soccer and too many other leagues are following suit, that’s positively a beacon of light.
November 24th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Good points. Hey, I’m just trying to think of a better way — I never said I thought it all the way through.
November 24th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
The strangest thing I read in all the final coverage was in Grant Wahl’s column http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/grant_wahl/11/20/mls.cup/index.html in which he says Landon Donovan’s nickname is “Big Game Lanny.” I have heard Donovan called many names, but “Big Game Lanny”? Really?
November 25th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Kenn, your response to the first objection (”[t]hat a playoff system that lets an eighth-place team that finished below .500 in the regular season be crowned ‘champions’ is inherently flawed”) amounts to 2/3 non-sequitur, 1/3 damning with faint praise, and one big straw man.
You responded citing the 2007 football Giants and the 2006 baseball Cardinals; however, both of those clubs had winning records, and the Cards won their division.
Your invocation of the 1938 Blackhawks was at least on point; but I daresay that such a comparison actually bolsters the position you mean to attack. (By which I mean to say — if you resort to defending a playoff system by comparing it to the NHL’s, then you are already in pretty bad shape.)
Most fundamentally, your response is off-base because it rests on a faulty assumption — namely, that criticising the current playoff system is the equivalent of calling for the abolition of playoffs entirely. Really, it would be exceedingly easy to design a better playoff structure:
* 6 teams qualify; 3 per conf.
* wk 1: Team 2 hosts Team 3; Team 1 bye
* wk 2: Conf. Championships: Team 1 hosts winner of Team 3 vs. Team 2
* wk 3: championship game
Such a system would be logical and fair, because it would weight the playoffs in favour of the higher seed. In this system, no one could complain about a lower seed’s becoming champion, since that lower seed would have had to take a tougher path than a higher seed. (The NFL had the perfect system in this regard from 1979 through 1989, when it had 2 wild cards per conference. This gave the wild cards a longer road to the title than all the division winners.)
Also, such a system, by offering very different rewards for finishing first, second, or third in the season, would preserve the integrity of the regular-season competition. This is a very important value, one which the defenders of the current playoff system ought not endeavour to obscure by means of sophistry about the MLS title being decided by a nice little mini-tournament.
But, of course, we know that this sort of logical playoff system has never been implemented by MLS, which invites a large number of teams and gives each team a home game as a means of maximising playoff revenue. Just please do not pretend that the current system has any sort of merit from the standpoint of competition.
November 25th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Thank you, Fernando.
I wish critics of MLS and its playoffs would put as much thought into their positions as you did.
Here’s my point: playoffs are where we are. It’s what we do. And, occasionally, a team that has an average or mediocre regular season (and if RSL had won one more game, they’d have had a winning record - would that have made the Cardinals and Giants analogies strong enough for you?) will win the “league championship.”
My problem is less with that occurring than it is with the people who have (and do) chosen this particular data point to launch one of their “MLS is stupid and doesn’t do things like every other league in the world” rants. I’m just tired of it. I don’t need to even look at Bigsoccer the day after a game like this to know that this is being brought up.
No matter WHAT playoff system you come up with, you run the risk of a low seed winning. And some people - seemingly - just can’t handle that emotionally. They feel it’s not “fair.” They want to legislate all but the faintest of chances that the highly-placed teams might lose right out of existence. Whether “no one could complain,” as you say, or not, is a non-starter. Soccer fans will ALWAYS complain, no matter what. If you want to make the eighth seed walk on hot coals, play three games in three days, go to Mass every day for a week, do the New York Times crossword puzzle and THEN if they win their games you’ll “accept” them as the champions, then I don’t know what to tell you.
“Most fundamentally, your response is off-base because it rests on a faulty assumption — namely, that criticising the current playoff system is the equivalent of calling for the abolition of playoffs entirely.”
That is NOT my assumption. My experience has been that there is a subset of fans who think there should be no playoffs at all, or that low-seeded teams should have to run the gauntlet to prove their worth before they’ll deign to accept their legitimacy. If that doesn’t describe you, fine. I wasn’t TALKING about you, or to you. I was talking about the morons, the mouthbreathing majority who knee-jerk absolutely everything that happens in MLS.
Please, do ME a favor - let’s not have another “my playoff suggestion is better than yours” discussion. This isn’t “my” playoff format. It’s the one we have. And whining about it isn’t going to do anything about it.
The people with the skin in the game make the decisions. Not you. Not me.
November 27th, 2009 at 7:45 am
I’m all for playoffs, but please get rid of penalty kicks. It’s not good that the “champion” won by getting to PKs in the semifinal and final (sometimes by cynical fouling by hacks like Chris Wingert). You don’t want someone to win the MLS Cup MVP by stopping penalty kicks.
November 29th, 2009 at 7:57 am
Possible compromise: Indirect free kicks from the PK spot?
It’d be more difficult, take more creativity and result in more high-speed shots to the dingly-danglies. Everybody wins!
December 16th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
I love the penalty shoot outs. Great way to end a game. High drama and tension all around. I say leave it. (I’m also using my vote to bring back the Golden Goal).
The 8th seeded teaming winning this league’s playoff should surprise no one. This is a league built for parity (I say mediocrity, but that might be too harsh), and the difference between top seed and bottom was one had a record of 13-7-10 and the other 11-12-7. Put those teams on a neutral site and tell me that one really is “favored” over the other. No way.
And Kenn, the people with skin in the game can and do make the decisions, but they also need fans and want the game to grown. I’m a huge soccer fan, an American, and I’ve traveled all over this country, and my experience is that the people I’ve met who are passionate about soccer ignore the MLS. I’ve only met one fan in my life - a KC Wizards supporter. I’m not saying that means owners should swallow all the garbage that soccer fans dish out, but I do think some basic structural changes to the MLS - changes the MLS vigorously opposes for financial reasons - would actually be financial boons to the MLS by increasing the leagues popularity amongst the people MLS most wants to attract - current American soccer fans that tune the MLS out.