MLS Releases 2011 Playoff Format: League Fixed Wrong Problems

It was somewhat inevitable that there were going to be grumblings no matter what playoff format MLS came up with for the 2011 season. If for no other reason, there were always going to be those of us who would rather see single-table than conferences and a few more who would like to see the playoffs eliminated entirely. But MLS seems to think that all criticism is created equal, or at least that’s what comments Nelson Rodriguez, the league’s executive vice president of competition and game operations seems to indicate in comments he made to MLSsoccer.com.

“There are so many variables that any system is imperfect in that regard,” Rodriguez said. “You could be facing the lowest-remaining seed who’s on a 10-game winning streak to close the season and they’re the hottest team in the league. … Any playoff system has within it, some fault or a flaw that could easily be pointed to.”

Rodriguez clearly is missing the point of the criticisms. It’s not that this system is imperfect, most reasonable people realize this is inevitable. Rather, it’s how imperfect it is.

The 10-team format with two play-in games actually makes some sense. Teams that can’t finish in the top 3 of their conferences should not be awarded any special privileges. At the same time, this format awards conference winners the chance of playing teams on shorter rest than they have received. There’s also a good chance that the Supporters’ Shield winner will end up playing a worse team in this format than they would have in the old format.

The problem, aside from the fact that there’s a better chance for very bad teams to even make the playoffs, is that a relatively bad regular-season team can still win a championship without ever proving very much. If the league was really interested in rewarding the regular season, there are a number of things it could have done to do that while keeping the basic framework of this system.

The easiest fix would have been to make the first tiebreaker in the conference semis regular-season point total. There would be the danger of the higher-seeded team packing it in and playing for a tie, but if there’s no arguing the value of the value of every regular-season game.

A more clunky, but potentially even more effective fix would have been to do away with the home-and-home aspect. In this scenario, the regular-season conference winners would automatically advance if they won the first game. A second game, which could also be played at the home of the conference winner, would only be necessary in the case of a tie or the wild-card team winning the first round. The conference semifinal not involving the conference winners could remain and home-and-home affair. Again, the goal here is rewarding regular-season performance.

Either of those solutions could have been adopted with minimal tweaks to the existing schedule and would have much more clearly rewarded regular-season performance. The issue most fans seem to have with this format is not how complicated or hard-to-explain it may be, but how little thinking seems to have gone into it.