MLS Week 28 Collective Rankings: Theories to Be Tested

There’s so much good, good stuff and so many angles to size in the data put out by the Semi-Detached Pundit Collective (SDPC) this week that I hardly know where to begin.  May as well start with the easy stuff: it’s an eleven-pundit pool thanks to Ryan Hunt making the deadline and the discovery that Goal.com’s weekly wraps end with power rankings (c’mon, people, I can’t find all this on my own).

Moving to the good, good stuff, I think the pundit pool has finally reached decent consensus on where each of the 13 teams belong; allowing for the exception of Houston and New England, each Major League Soccer (MLS) team was assigned the rank they hold in the standings by the most pundits.  To wrap all that up, DC remains undisputed #1, but no less significantly, Chivas stands as undisputed #2.  After that, you’ve got Houston virtually tied with New England, which proceeds to a middle passage that begins with Chicago before meandering past the twin make-weight, playoff-bound mediocrities known as Red Bull and FC Dallas; from there, we rubber-neck past the LA/KC tangle for last-playoff-place honors before running into the tight tangle of half-starved urchins – Colorado, Columbus, and RSL – with faces pressed hungrily and hopelessly against the playoff glass.  And, left out skulking in the cold sits Toronto FC at lonely #13.

But still another angle presents itself.  Anyone who compiles rankings makes a claim or claims of greater or lesser eccentricity, an outlier of a vote as to how a given team will stack up against another.  Each of the 11 pundits in this week’s pool took one of these wild stabs (well…more or less wild) and that’s what I’m going to look at after the rankings: each pundit’s “pet” theories and whether they will hold up against the cold, clear evidence of Week 28’s results.  Call these The Eleven Theories to Be Proved, each of which will face trial by soccer in one of this weekend’s tilts.  (NOTE: The individual authors may not see their text as I see it; just let it be known I’m parsing each author’s numbers without their input or guidance.)

If that doesn’t make sense, here’s to hoping it will below.  I’m a bit smitten by the numbers today.  As for the mechanics, the usual stuff applies: in parentheses after the current week’s ranking and average, you’ll see the most common ranking for each team (e.g. three #1 votes, which will show below as “#1 X 3”) and the previous week’s ranking and average.

Here are the participants for Week 27’s pool:

Center Holds It (Me)
MLS Underground/American Soccer Daily
My Soccer Blog
WVHooligan
Sports Illustrated (Ryan Hunt)
Goal.com (Kyle McCarthy)
Fox Soccer (Keith Costigan)
ESPN (another collective)
Fullback Files
Tim (the Enchanter) & Fire_Juve10

And…drumroll, please….here are the collective rankings, comments to follow:

1. DC United, 1.0 (#1 X 11; last week, #1, 1.0)
2. Chivas USA, 2.0 (#2 X 11; last week #2, 2.6)
3. Houston Dynamo, 3.5 (#3 X 6; last week, #3, 3.0)
4. New England Revolution, 3.7 (#3 X 5; last week, #4, 3.4)
5. Chicago Fire, 4.9 (#5 X 8; last week, #5, 5.3)
6. FC Dallas, 6.4 (#6 X 7; last week, #7, 7.2)
7. Red Bull New York, 7.4 (#7 X 5; last week, #6, 5.8)
8. Los Angeles Galaxy, 8.1 (#8 X 4; last week, #9, 9.2)
9. Kansas City Wizards, 8.3 (#9 X 6; last week, #8, 8.0)
10. Colorado Rapids, 10.7 (#10 X 6; last week, #12, 11.6)
11. Columbus Crew, 11.0 (#11 X 8; last week, #10, 10.3)
12. Real Salt Lake, 11.1 (#12 X 6; last week, #11, 10.6)
13. Toronto FC, 13.0 (#13 X 11; last week, #13, 13.0)

The Eleven* Theories to Be Proved
Here’s how this works: each pundit in the pool made an outlier ranking on one or more teams and below is a list of the Week 28 game that will test each pundit’s view on how that team.  The ranking number in parentheses after each team’s name states where that pundit in question ranked the teams involved in the game.  Does that make sense?  Will it after I’m done?  We shall see…anyway, the games are listed in no particular order and with the home team first.
(* I had to give up at ten theories.  I struggled to squeeze in a few as is and Fire_Juve10 matched all of them, even the stretches.  So, just ten pairings and my apologies to Fire_Juve10.)

Center Holds It
New England Revolution (#5) v. Columbus Crew (#11)
Only two pundits slipped New England out of the top four and I’m one of them…some fan.  A loss to a Columbus team almost universally regarded as weak and dead goes a little way to confirming that.

ESPN
Red Bull New York (#5) v. Kansas City Wizards (#8)
Red Bull is MLS’s fifth team?  Ya think?  A win over KC may convince some people they’re worth the lofty praise the ESPN collective heaped upon them.  What will they do with a loss?

WV Hooligan
New England Revolution (#3) v. Columbus Crew (#11)
Kind of the flipside of mine: if New England really is MLS’s #3 team, they should have little trouble with lowly Columbus, especially at home.

My Soccer Blog
Chivas USA (#2) v. Colorado Rapids (#12)
No one hates on Colorado like My Soccer Blog’s Mike H.  If the Rocky Mountain team is worse than Columbus, RSL –  everyone but Toronto, really – shouldn’t the league’s second-best rather roughly have their way with them?  (Do note that I ranked these two teams exactly the same.)

FOX Soccer
Red Bull New York (#8) v. Kansas City Wizards (#7)
One of only two pundits to take the unpopular view that KC is better than Red Bull (Goal.com is the other, but they had something wackier), we’ll get that theory tested this weekend, albeit with some fairly nettlesome controls (e.g. home-field advantage for Red Bull, not to mention the psychological edge built courtesy of New York shattering KC’s post-season dreams two years running).

MLS Underground
FC Dallas (#6) v. Chivas USA (#2)
Tonight’s Thursday prime-time tilt tests just one thing: the extent to which Chivas earned that undisputed #2.  A Dallas loss won’t surprised anyone, but Chivas losing will get people wondering about who is #2 all over again – especially if other results feed the doubts.

Goal.com
Los Angeles Galaxy (#11) v. Toronto FC (#13)
Unlike the rest of the pundiverse, Kyle McCarthy doesn’t believe in the LA surge.  Donovan’s (OK, and Beckham’s) brood is dead to them.  All those #7, #8 and even #6 rankings suggest everyone else thinks LA will win their next two games, which sets up MLS’s Grand Finale Dream…which, at time of writing, they seem content to bury on Telefutura.

Fullback Files
DC United (#1) v. Chicago Fire (#5)
This one is something of a throw-away: DC should beat Chicago at home, but that near-universal #5 ranking for Chicago suggests a tie would surprise no one.  A Chicago win, however, has potential to make people do crazy things with a team that will enter the post-season in the 6th seed, at best.

Sports Illustrated
Real Salt Lake (#12) v. Houston Dynamo (#4)
Even if the majority has RSL at #12, a healthy plurality pegged ‘em as the #10 team in the league.  If Houston ain’t fer real, that ought to show up on Monday when the Dynamo visit Rice-Eccles.  Houston doesn’t want to limp into the playoffs for obvious reasons.

Tim
Los Angeles Galaxy (#6) v. Toronto FC (#13)
As noted above, there’s a broad consensus that LA has a real shot at the playoffs, but a #6 goes that extra mile by seeming to dub it likely.  What will a fifth LA win do to their numbers?  Not much, I don’t think.  But it would make Tim’s #6 look something between prophetic and justified…especially if they follow that with a win over Red Bull to take with them to Chicago.