If your league doesn’t have a pick-your-opponent playoff format I don’t want it
“Scared money don’t make money”
-Benny Feilhaber
MLS Next Pro got really lucky, it must be said. There couldn’t possibly have been a better ending for their first experiment in the realm of playoff formats than how it went down at Sunday’s golden hour in Columbus. Not only the final happened to be the first time a representative from Austin FC played on the home field of the Columbus Crew, the franchise who five years ago was saved from a potential relocation to Austin, but it also featured an away team who had played away through the entirety of the playoffs.
What makes Austin’s playoff run even more incredible, and their eventual win one of the craziest finishes in American soccer history is that, in the first round this team was picked by their opponent despite not being the lowest seed available. The reasoning, despite Benny Feilhaber’s quote, which immediately became a hall-of-fame MLS moments that preceded unfortunate events, was that Austin had been really bad to close out the regular season, going six consecutive games without a win in regulation, and coupling an exceptional defense with an underwhelming attack.
I can’t say that it wasn’t a good reasoning, in principle. I can’t say it because I too followed that same exact thought process when I previewed the post-season, and I’ll call myself out saying that I deserve a mention on Freezing Cold Takes for this paragraph:
The vibes are officially off. […] It could very well be turn out to be a call-an-ambulance-but-not-for-me moment, but it’d be way too convoluted of a strategy.
It was not too convoluted of a strategy, or maybe it was, but convoluted is exactly what can work in MLS and all its affiliated enterprises. Looking at it with hindsight, it should be noted that even in the tough stretch to end the season, Austin did not magically lose what had made their regular season so special up to that point. Among Western Conference teams, they still had the second-best defense in the final stretch of the season, conceding only thirteen goals. Yes, they had conceded only ten in the previous eighteen games, but that was a hardly sustainable stat-line over a longer sample.
What stopped Austin in the last ten games of the year was, as already mentioned, an attack that managed to score only twelve goals against the twenty-eight scored in the first eighteen games off the mark. That was probably a worrisome sign, and it was by quite a margin the worst scoring performance in both conferences, but at the same time, once Austin’s name sprung up from the lips of Benny Feilhaber, all of the previous reasonings went out the window, because if scared money don’t make money, how can you be scared when you have nothing to lose and everything to earn?
I’ve held myself accountable for counting Austin out too soon, but even I don’t know if, in the position of an MLS Next Pro coach having to choose an opponent — I’m not going to name Feilhaber anymore because this isn’t a piece specifically against him, just to be clear — I’d have had the guts to pick Austin even though there were clear reasons to pick them. That may be because, although not religious, I’m a god-fearing person at heart, and I don’t want to challenge whatever divine force is out there by going outside my lane, but I do think it isn’t just me.
Not respecting the pecking order automatically puts into motion the process of underdog-isation of the team picked, and whatever evidence or thought process there might have been behind that pick, it flies out the window. It’s not that the weaknesses are eliminated, it isn’t simply just a matter of a team finding something they didn’t have before to correct their issues because they felt disrespected, it’s that it makes clear to everyone whichever is the weakness the higher seeded team is looking to exploit. One could equate it to calling a bluff in poker, but it’s more like happily giggling at the good cards you received, it puts a target on your back more than on your opponent’s.
Now, it is true that these stats I’ve heavily talked about weren’t the only notable thing about Austin. They were still a really good defense with a top goalkeeper in the league. Picking them was always going to result in a tough game, no matter their recent form. But let’s take the teams actually involved out of the equation for a moment, let’s think of this format in any other context imaginable. In punditry and media, you hear a lot of talk about the dream matchup, about how one team’s strengths can be interwoven with the opposition’s weaknesses.
You hear this type of talk, but you rarely do so from coaches and general managers and more generic front office intelligentsia, because everyone wants to keep a level of secrecy. It’s why every few years there might be a scandal about sign stealing. Even when you do things out in the open, you don’t want to let people know about your plans, to the point of reaching some astronomical levels of childishness when you don’t want your opponent to interpret your signals like everyone at home and in the stands is already doing.
There’s no place for secrecy with a pick-your-opponent playoff format. Or at least, you have the choice of either keeping it or sacrificing it at the altar of a supposedly easier matchup. This adds a whole new dimension to this game. It’s basically forcing teams to play 4D chess. It’s exhilarating to watch as a neutral fan and it got me so excited, I stopped what I was doing to watch a recording of the Zoom meeting in which the picks were made.
Imagine now a bigger league not only making it a feature of their playoff format, but potentially also showing it on television with higher production quality. I watch and write about MLS, but it just came into my mind that UEFA could do this with the Champions League after the league stage of the upcoming Swiss Model format and honestly this thought alone made the Swiss Model go from an atrocity to something that should be at least experimented with.
Sometimes the best innovations are the simplest, and it makes you wonder why nobody thought of it before. This is a relatively simple innovation, but at the same time it’s also very easy to see why it has never been adopted before as far as I know. It takes a league so dedicated to either shithousery or, most simply, really open to experimentation because there is nothing to lose, like a developmental organization for a major league, to try something like that. But once it proves to be working, how scared should the said major league be to actively incorporate it in their format? MLS has not yet adopted any of the innovations coming from MLS Next Pro. This, of the many experiments, is by far the most audacious, but it’s also genuinely exciting and has created a sincere buzz when its existence was firstly shared and when it finally impacted the season.
You know what seems to be in dire need of genuine appreciation from fans, stability, and a way to feel both exciting without feeling manufactured? Yes, that’s exactly the MLS Cup Playoffs. I’m one of the warmest towards this new format, although I can’t say to actually love it, but my opinion isn’t the point: most people hate that. And maybe these weeks will show fans why the best-of-three is the best format imaginable and everyone will be in love with it but I’d predict that it won’t. MLS fans have been asking for stability in the playoffs, yes, but most recently they’ve asked about change first, and then stability once a well appreciated format is introduced.
So why not this change? It may be my recency bias showing, as I said in the opening sentence, what happened was the best-case scenario for this format. But how does the worst-case scenario look like? I’d say something along the lines of nobody ever picks somebody they’re not supposed to pick and it’s a normal playoff with seeding like it’d have been otherwise. Maybe we go on to forget that it’s a pick-your-opponent format for ages until one day an old, wise and soft-spoken José Martinez, now a head coach for the Waco Magnolias, the 100th MLS team owned by the children of Chip and Joanna Gaines, shows up calmly to his pre-game press conference with a big, dusty rulebook and reminds everyone, including commissioner Don Garber, of the existence of an old and forgotten rules, one that will allow his team to pick whichever opponent they want in the 90-teams playoff field. Slowly reaching towards the microphone, he mumbles a couple words, which the one journalist in attendance via Zoom initially thinks to be just some mutterings in Spanish. He repeats them, now with a firmer tone of voice so that everyone notices: “Scared money don’t make money”, he says.
