MLS Internet Oddities

by Dave Clark on Sep 10, 2009 7:52 PM PDT in Sounders: MLS Regular Season

Cruising the 'net researching this wonderful upcoming match between Seattle and DC United I found a few intriguing themes concerning the league.

EVERYONE is focused on the Playoff Race.

Even if they get the tiebreakers wrong. There's a great widget at DCUnited's blog. I almost loaded it here. Then I realized that the tie-breaker they use is Wins. Most fan blogs use as their lead tiebreaker Goal Differential.

Here's a reminder of the Tie-Breakers

1) The highest position shall be awarded to the team with the better win/loss record in current regular season games against all other teams equal in points. (head-to-head competition)

2) If the teams are still equal in the standings, the highest position shall be awarded to the team with the greater goal difference against all other teams during the regular season. (goal differential)

3) If the teams are still equal in the standings, the highest position shall be awarded to the team scoring the greatest number of total goals against all other teams during the regular season. (total goals)

4) If the teams are still equal in the standings, the procedures described in this section shall be applied only to games played on the road by each team against all other teams during the regular season. (road 1-3)

5) If the teams are still equal in the standings, the procedures described in this section shall be applied only to games played at home by each team against all other teams during the regular season. (home 1-3)

6) If the teams are still equal in the standings, the highest position shall be awarded to the team with the fewest team disciplinary points in the League Fair Play table during the regular season.

7) If the teams are still equal in the standings, the highest position in the standings shall be determined by the toss of a coin.

8) The first tiebreaker in a three-way tie is also head-to-head, but it is determined via points-per-game versus the other two teams. If two teams are tied in points-per-game head-to-head, the next tie breaker is goal difference.

If the Season ended right now, Chivas USA could not be the 8 seed as they do not hold the tie-breaker v they, RSL and NER

Chivas has 3 points in 3 matches played
RSL has 6 in four
NER has 6 in 3

Jeff Bradley has a piece on the milestone seasonal numbers. It is a solid read. It gives Seattle a reference for some history in the league.

BUT, the Crew are still pacing for a 50 point season - 53 in fact. They've home games left in the bag. Too often we all forget this. Any assumption made on final points must have some inclusion of home/away history.

And while 20 goals may be from a bygone era while the best transfer overseas. Would a league with multiple teams with two players at 10+ goals really be a boring league? As for the double double (secondary assists to be certain) I would be amazed if Cummings doesn't do it. Nate Jaqua has as good a shot as any as well.

He is wise to note that the playoffs will be distinctly influenced by home-field.

Lastly, Toronto fans will almost certainly get their grass. Those Mar/Nov home games on grass are going to be a thrill for their players.

With March having average sunshine of less than 4 hours per day, a mean temp of 34 degrees Toronto may get to see the wonderment of not just the orange ball, but also match rescheduling due to frozen pitch. Or they could just never play at home for the start of the season (a start which will need to move up if the league is to avoid things like the World Cup).

Then there are the playoffs. November is warmer (mean 41), but it rains twice as much and they get only three hours of sunshine a day.

I hope for TFC fans' sake that that their grounds crew can handles those conditions better than the average team in the world, watching football in puddles and mud isn't the key to improving quality. Sure, I'm focused on the worst case, probably because that's all I ever hear about current gen Field Turf.

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Comments

Hi Dave,
I’m the Sr Developer at dcunited and I worked on the widget today. I’ll check on the logic of breaking ties, its a little messy since the rules are written assuming all games have been played.
I interpreted #1 to mean that if teams are level on points, the first tie breaker is overall record (#wins, then #ties if #wins is equal). If they have identical records, then you’d use goal differential.
Thanks for checking out the widget!

by Oscar on Sep 10, 2009 8:37 PM PDT reply actions

All,

I am emailing Oscar with some suggestions. By the way

HUGE UPS to DC United and their blog. In less than a half hour they posted a response on a minor MLS blog that was critical of something they did.

And, they are looking into things.

by Dave Clark on Sep 10, 2009 9:00 PM PDT up reply actions

still looking into this, but found that this link http://www.playoffstatus.com/mls/mlsstandings.html
also has the first tie breaker as we do.

by Oscar on Sep 11, 2009 9:25 AM PDT reply actions

dave-minor MLS blogger? I dunno, with the amount of blogs and boards you run..
This site, however, is the most Anoraking and Stats-oriented site for all the Sounders websites. I still don’t understand some of your player evaluations and coefficients, somewhat arbitrary to me. :)
so when you both say 1st tie breaker, you really mean the 2nd tiebreaker, the first you both agree upon is the head to head w/l right?

by sounderific on Sep 11, 2009 7:00 PM PDT reply actions

Oscar, I don’t know if you can share this, but I’d be really curious as to how you eventually implement the head to head in your app. I’ve done some light programming (VB, VBA, Perl – mostly data processing stuff) and I was trying to figure out how one would set up a data structure to hold the head-to-head info without a ton of redundancy and update headaches.

by CarlosT on Sep 11, 2009 7:50 PM PDT reply actions

Sounderific, no, that’s the point Dave is making, that the sites and apps out there have the tiebreakers wrong because they start with something other than head to head. Not that I blame them. Implementing the head to head so it can update as results come in is not a trivial problem.

by CarlosT on Sep 11, 2009 7:54 PM PDT reply actions

The First Tie Breaker is head to head record amongst tied the tied parties. That is where a vast majority of MLS based sites are wrong. The league basically says that if TFC and Seattle both end with 43 point, Seattle would be in, as they won and tied v Toronto.

by Dave Clark on Sep 12, 2009 11:24 AM PDT reply actions

I think the first tie breaker should be “number of blogs dedicated to club.”

by WendellGee on Sep 17, 2009 7:28 AM PDT reply actions

I did, I hope, manage to get the tie breaking rules correct on our playoff widget. The code is also behind the standings tables on our site, and its now matching the standings as on mlsnet.com
Dave has it right, in that the first tie breaker is head to head record. The kicker is that its amongst the tied parties, and it was just my luck that when we released the widget, we had 3 teams tied on the same number of points.
@CarlosT – The code isn’t too convoluted, even for PHP. Basically, I have an array that holds the records for all the teams. I use the uasort() function to implement a custom sorting function that runs through all the rules for breaking ties. If it detects that teams are tied on points, it creates an internal array for just the teams tied on points and runs that through all the tie-breaking logic (which is easier at this point since you can skip rule #1) and returns the order in which the tied teams should be sorted.

by Oscar on Sep 21, 2009 7:38 AM PDT reply actions