The year was 1998 and ESPN The Magazine was just getting started. I was a part of The Magazine's original staff and I brought with me a love for Major League Soccer, having spent 1996-97 working as PR director for the team formerly known as the MetroStars.
There wasn't a ton of space in The Mag for MLS, but there was this crazy, relatively new vehicle known as the Internet that folks (in particular, soccer folks) were turning to for information. So I asked the folks at ESPN.com if it would be all right if I wrote a weekly column known as The Boot Room to keep MLS fans up on the buzz around the league.
And for about four years, the Boot Room was where I wrote about MLS online. Over time, I got pulled away from writing the Boot Room and something called the "blog" began to take over. Yeah, my column was out there before the word "blog."
Well, lately I've been itching to get the old (one man) band back together. So…
Welcome to the Boot Room. It's great to be back.
The System
Today, the New York Times' Jack Bell digs into the whole playoff concept, saying it's "needlessly complicated and some other uncomplimentary adjectives."
He's correct, of course.
This is the 15th year of the MLS playoffs and it would take a league historian to recap the many formats that have been tried out. In the beginning, there were best-of-three series with shootouts to decide tie games. There were years when both conference semifinals and finals were decided on two-game aggregate (where now, it's only the semifinals that are two games, which seems a tad unfair as it increases the likelihood that the league's best teams will suffer an early knockout). There have been years where it's straight, top four in each conference and years (like this one) where you can have an Eastern team winning the Western Conference, or vice versa.
It's been my opinion all along that there's an easy fix.
Let the regular season Eastern and Western Conference champions bypass the first round of the playoffs and set up to host a one-game conference final. Let the second- and third-place teams in each conference play off to determine who goes to the conference finals.
So, this year, we'd have Los Angeles and New York selling tickets to conference final games at the Home Depot Center and Red Bull Arena, while Salt Lake and Dallas play off in the Western semifinal and Columbus and Kansas City face in the Eastern semifinal.
Sure, it's only six teams getting a chance at the playoffs, but that is more in line with what soccer purists want to see anyway.
Wondo-Ful World
A theory was thrown my way today, and it would be hard to argue against it.
Should San Jose's Chris Wondolowski win the MVP Award (to go along with the Golden Boot he already snatched for his 18 goals), he would become MLS's Kurt Warner -- that is, a rags-to-riches story for the ages. In some ways, the Golden Boot (secured when he scored the Quakes' final 10 goals of the season) puts him up there with former grocery store bagger Warner.USA Today's Beau Dure touches upon it, telling the story of how Wondolowski was not offered a Division-I soccer scholarship and that he ended up playing for D-II Chico State. He ended up being selected in the supplemental phase of the 2005 MLS draft by the Quakes, only because he'd been so stubborn in showing up again and again at San Jose's combines.
Yet here Wondolowski stands, at 27, on top of the MLS scoring charts. Of course, the question on the minds of U.S. fans now (as with all goal scorers) is: Will Wondo get a look from the U.S. national team?
Well, I could ask my brother -- U.S. coach Bob Bradley -- if he was planning on calling in Wondo to the January camp, but we all know he'd be tight-lipped, right?
So I'll just throw this at you. The top American scorer in MLS has never gone uncapped. In fact, you have to search long and hard to find any Americans who've scored 10 or more goals in an MLS season but did not earn a cap. You have Steve Rammel, who tallied 14 for DC and Pete Marino, who scored 11 for Columbus, in the inaugural season of 1996. You have Ross Paule, who scored 10 for Colorado in 1998. Musa Shannon (dual citizenship with Liberia) found the back of the net 12 times for Tampa in 1999. And Chris Carrieri scored 11 for Colorado in 2002.
So you have to like Wondo's chances.