Friday, January 6, 2012

Crew Easy & Seattle Burning

If you look west then angle your head a little north you might see smoke billowing out of Seattle. Why? The folks contributing to Sounder at Heart info factory are/have been working hard. I'm constantly impressed with the way they weave numbers and digits and things together. There is no question they are the leaders in digesting MLS data and turning it into understandable and useful information.

Yesterday "sidereal" (if I could find her/his real name, I would use it) put up a great post that dives into next years MLS (unbalanced) scheduling. "Sidereal" looks at strength of schedule and distance the team has to travel this season. Revealing stuff.

Last year I spent a lot of time on Eastern teams traveling west to play late start games. It was pretty amazing that a league would not only schedule these games so late, but they would also do so when an eastern team had multiple league games that week. Thus, artificially raising western teams records (even if just a little). Something to keep in mind when reviewing any strength of schedule reports based on last year's team records.

As for the analysis done by "sidereal"? At the very least, it shows that 2012 is a favorable year for Columbus as far as travel and strength of schedule.

Now, if only "sidereal" would do the same thing to last years season (match it up to actual results and all)...

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