Does anyone know if they'll be running it again this year, and if so, will Sounder at Heart be running a fantasy competition like they did last year? The main page hasn't been updated since the end of last season. The game had its problems and more than its fair share of detractors, but I really enjoyed it. If it's not running, will Sounder at Heart host a fantasy competition on a different service?

As we all know, the new format introduces unbalanced scheduling between the conferences.  What I did not realize at first, but which was pointed out in the comment threads here at Sounder at Heart, is that there is also unbalanced scheduling within conferences.  No longer do you play each team home and away,but you'll play teams within your conference three times, half of them once away and twice at home, and the other half once at home and twice away.  This might give a significant advantage to teams who, by luck of the draw, avoid playing teams with a tough home field advantage twice at their home turf, or in cases of interconference play, avoid those tough home pitches altogether.  But how big of a deal is this?  I decided to delve into Excel and try to find out.

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The Sounders just finished a run against a weak slate of teams-  Vancouver, Toronto, and Chicago- and has a stretch of games against difficult teams ahead- New York, Colorado, and LA are in our next four.  Complicating the matter of assessing the schedule, however, is home field advantage: the Sounders had two of their three against bad teams on the road but welcome two of the three more difficult opponents to Qwest Field.

In most sports and leagues, there would be no question as to which stretch of games were more difficult: home field advantage matters, but it's nowhere near enough to cancel out the difference between the top and bottom teams of a league.  It occurred to me that MLS might be different, however: the league has a notorious amount of parity, and perhaps because of this, home field advantage means a great deal; according to the stats wizards on this site, it's worth about 0.5 goal differential per game.  Instead of flying blind, I decided to do a simple statistical overview myself using last year's data (more data may improve the sample size, at the risk of taking into account factors that no longer obtain: in particular, the implementation and expansion of the DP rule should have a noticeable effect on parity).  I examined the results of when the top 6 teams in the league played the bottom 6 teams in the league and recorded the goal differential.  These are the results from the perspective of the top 6 teams; bear in mind that each played 12 games total against the bottom six.

LA Galaxy: +12
Real Salt Lake: +15
New York Red Bulls: +10
Columbus Crew: +12
FC Dallas: +9
Seattle Sounders: +2  

This gives us an average goal differential of +0.833 for the top third of the league when playing the bottom third of the league.  If we ignore the outlier, Seattle, we get the top five teams with an average goal differential of +0.966, or as near to +1 as makes no matter.  I have often heard on this site that home field advantage is worth around +0.5 goal differential per game, so it looks like both have to be taken into account.  Crudely combining the two measures, a top third team going on the road against one of the bottom-dwellers would get a +1.0 goal diferential from their superior skill and a -0.5 goal differential from going on the road, with an expected goal differential of +0.5.  This is exactly the same goal differential as a top third team would be expected to post against another top third team if they were hosting them.  In other words, the LA Galaxy face as stiff a test going on the road to Toronto as they do welcoming the Red Bulls to home depot center.  We have about as much of a chance of walking away with three points when we welcome the Rapids to Qwest in a few weeks as we did when we traveled to Toronto.

This data is pretty rough, and I would welcome more insight, but the broad strokes seem to indicate that intuitive analysis overemphasizes the role of opponent skill in determining results and underemphasizes home field advantage. 

One would think that this ought to shape our expectations when it comes to Sounders games, but our team seems to be  an outlier in both cases.  If last year's data is any indication, we don't really care that much about team skill, and previous works on S@H have indicated that we care for home field advantage much less than any other team.  Still, while the home field advantage outlier seems well established, I'm relatively convinced that 2010's weirdly equal performance against good and bad teams is just statistical noise.  I haven't taken a look at the data from 2009 or 2011 yet, but I suspect that Seattle's weirdly anemic record against the bottom third of teams last year has to do with the dramatic improvement from one half of the season to another.  We played each team more or less once in each the first half and second half of the season, and we were nearly unbeatable in the second half of the season (10-2-3), while we couldn't buy a win in the first half (4-8-3), and of course, this is because the team was very different in the first half of the season as compared to the second half.

I came into this season with some high hopes for this Seattle squad.  While we may have bummed out of the playoffs in a disappointing manner, we also absolutely killed the second half of the season, and would have claimed the supporters shield had the season only consisted of the final 15 games each team played.  As a healthier and deeper version of the squad that looked like a smart pick to win it all going into the playoffs last year, I thought we at least had a shot at the Supporter's Shield.  That would have been a major success; a bye in the West would have been a moderate success, a wildcard spot would be a mild disappointment, and failure to make the playoffs would be a major one.

 

Then opening weekend happened, and a few weeks later, the spate of injuries.  While the conventional table would have you believe that we're still occupying a playoff spot, the much more reliable points per game measure has us sitting at 12th in the league, two spots clear of a playoff qualifier.  There are, of course, extenuating circumstances.  The Sounders might have played the toughest schedule in the league so far (okay, SKC's mammoth road trip has us beat), with one more road game than home game, and having squared off, according to SBNation's power rankings. against two of the three tier 1 teams,  and all 4 non-Sounders tier 2 teams, while skipping 3 tier 3 and 2 tier 4 teams.  To put it another way, we have only skipped one team in the upper half of the tiers (though that one is Real Salt Lake), and have five games against the lower two tiers before the metaphorical midpoint of the season.  In addition, I believe that the current SBN power rankings are a smidge too beholden to preseason expectations, and are underrating Sounders' opponents Philadelphia, Columbus, and Portland.  An analysis of this type that used ESPN, MFUSA, mlssoccer.com, or other power rankings would almost certainly come out even more favorably for the Sounders.  And while the long-term injury situation still looks bleak, with Zakuani and White out indefinitely, there's hope that Montero, Rosales, Evans, and Friberg will all find themselves fully fit shortly.

 

Despite all that, the Sounders still sit in the bottom half of the league, and on the outside looking in on the playoff race, and the season, now a third over for the Sounders, will undoubtedly be colored by this anemic start.  The Supporter's Shield is clearly out of the question now, and with the West starting to bare its fangs, with Dallas, Portland, and Chivas rounding into form, the Sounders sit all the way at 7th in the Western conference in PPG standings.  On the other hand, a run of good results could change the race in a hurry (just ask any of those three teams); the race is exceedingly close at the moment, with 3rd-place bye LA Galaxy (they're behind RSL and FCD) sporting a 1.67 PPG average, while 7th-place Seattle sits only a bit behind them at 1.27.  Extrapolating LAG's PPG pace to the 11 games the Sounders have played, LA sits at 18.37 points to Seattle's 14- certainly not an insurmountable barrier.  A win against a struggling SKC at home this weekend would be Seattle at 1.41 PPG, getting them to 6th place in the conference and at 17 points compared to LAG's extrapolated 20.04 over 12 games- in other words, within a single game's striking distance.

 

The prognosis then, looks mixed, with many plausible reasons for both pessimism and optimism.  For my part, I've abandoned any hope of the Supporter's Shield, and securing a bye in the competitive West should replace that as the plausible best case scenario.  Given the problems, I think a wildcard spot should be considered an acceptable, neither successful or unsuccessful regular season result, and failure to make the playoffs a disappointment, though not a catastrophic one.  What say the rest of you?

The standings, as they're published, often don't say as much as I would like them to.  Too often important differences in current performance are obscured by differences in number of games played, and unlike in other sports, there's no easy way to account for games in hand.  So I decided to fire up Excel and start calculating points per game averages- I think the only fair way of comparing teams who have played a differing number of games.  For clarification and to put it into a more familiar format, I also extrapolated this PPG total over the number of games similar to what most teams had played- this week, 7- to see roughly how far the teams were apart.  Here are my results.

 

 First number is points per game, second is points extrapolated assuming they had played 7 games.  The number before their name is their overall rank.

 

West:
1.) Real Salt Lake- 2.4 - 16.8
6.) Los Angeles Galaxy- 1.67 - 11.67
7.) Seattle Sounders- 1.5- 10.5
8.) Colorado Rapids- 1.43- 10
8.) Portland Timbers- 1.43- 10
8.) FC Dallas- 1.43-  10
11.) Chivas USA- 1.29- 9
16.) Vancouver Whitecaps- 0.75- 5.25
17.) San Jose Earthquakes- 0.71- 5

East:
2.) Philadelphia Union- 2.17 - 15.17
3.) New York Red Bulls- 2 - 14
4.) Houston Dynamo- 1.71 - 12
4.) Columbus Crew- 1.71 - 12
12.) New England Revolution- 1.13- 7.88
13.) DC United- 1- 7
14.) Toronto FC- 0.88- 6.13
15.) Chicago Fire- 0.86- 6
18.) Sporting KC- 0.67- 4.67

 
The conferences look like they have much more parity this year than last year.  Interestingly, according to this, if the season ended today and we used last year's playoff format, there would be 4 teams from the East and 4 from the West (of course, with this year's format it would go 6-4 in the West's favor).  The average ranking of a West team is 9.111 and the average ranking of an East team is 9.6666.  Not much of a difference!

Long story short: UT's law program is awesome and comparatively very cheap, so I'll start attending the school in the fall.  And I have no idea how to balance loyalty to the school with my life-long Mizzou fandom.

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I haven't found one to listen to consistently (other than the Fastest 40 Minutes in Podcasting!), so I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions.

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Here's the path:

 

1.) Auburn becomes the clear number one in the human polls after wins over Alabama in the Iron Bowl and South Carolina in the SECCG.  If the number two in the human polls isn't getting many number one votes, it makes them much easier to pass.

 

2.) With their bias towards recent results, the human polls value Missouri's late win against Oklahoma in the Big 12 championship game very highly.  It's enough to get us to number 3, ahead of Michigan State for the first time in the human polls.  The Mountain West winner and Boise probably fall behind earlier in the season, as their SOS catches up with them.

 

3.) The human polls are now fairly consistent in ranking:

1. Auburn

2. Oregon

3. Missouri

4.) The computers continue to hate Oregon and love Missouri.  Oregon stays clear of the top 5 in the computer rankings, as they are right now (the comp polls that matter currently have them at 6, 6, 8, 8, 10).  Missouri, meanwhile, surges ahead on the backs of two more wins notched over elite competition and sees numbers mildly better than their current ones (1, 2, 2, 2, 3)

 

5.) Missouri's being ranked 5 places higher on average in the computer polls is enough to counteract the Duck's one place advantage in the human polls.  All hell breaks lose in BCS land.

 

Either way, should make for a great season.  Poll analysis can be fun, but let's not let it distract from the product on the field.  The rest of the season should be a blast no matter what the polls think of us, and we shouldn't let them put a damper on what should be a wild ride, successful or no.

Admittedly, that's because his polls are not power rankings but only, and Mizzou was one of the few teams to beat someone from a big 6 conference in the first week.  http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/BlogPoll-Week-One-It-s-Boise-State-out-of-the-?urn=ncaaf-268283

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Okay, so I admit it, I'm a World Cup bandwaggoner.  The most recent magical run and the buzz around the Sounders got me into American soccer again, this time I hope for good.

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I came downstairs two days ago, after watching the first half of the Netherlands-Denmark game to find my father comatose on the couch.  An hour later, he was pronounced dead at Arlington Medical Center.

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I miss that stuff.

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Do you got anything in the pipeline for those of us bandwagoners who only really started paying attention when Mizzou got that third seed in the tournament?  I'm ashamed to admit that I missed most of last season, but I'm really excited for this one.  However, I don't know most of the personalities or the big players or what our strengths are, aside from the "fastest 40 minutes in basketball" thing.  Can ya help a newbie out?

 

Peanut Butter Blossoms <!-- <div id="Recipes_ctl00_JifContent_SubContent_RatingCurrent" class="RatingBox" style="margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><img style="border:0px; padding: 0px; margin:0px;" src="/images/recipes/star_full.gif" width="12" height="11" alt="4.6 Star Rating" title="Rating: 4.6 Stars" /><img style="border:0px; padding: 0px; margin:0px;" src="/images/recipes/star_full.gif" width="12" height="11" alt="4.6 Star Rating" title="Rating: 4.6 Stars" /><img style="border:0px; padding: 0px; margin:0px;" src="/images/recipes/star_full.gif" width="12" height="11" alt="4.6 Star Rating" title="Rating: 4.6 Stars" /><img style="border:0px; padding: 0px; margin:0px;" src="/images/recipes/star_full.gif" width="12" height="11" alt="4.6 Star Rating" title="Rating: 4.6 Stars" /><img src="/images/recipes/star_empty.gif" width="12" height="11" alt="4.6 Star Rating" title="Rating: 4.6 Stars" /></div> -->

 

Ingredients:

•	1/2 cup Crisco® Butter Shortening
•	1/2 cup Jif® Creamy Peanut Butter
•	1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
•	1/2 cup granulated sugar
•	1 large egg
•	2 tablespoons milk
•	1 teaspoon vanilla extract
•	1 3/4 cups Pillsbury BEST® All Purpose Flour
•	1 teaspoon baking soda
•	1/2 teaspoon salt
•	Sugar
•	48 foil-wrapped milk chocolate pieces, unwrapped

 

Directions:

1.	HEAT oven to 375°F.
2.	CREAM together shortening, peanut butter, brown sugar and 1/2 cup sugar. Add egg, milk and vanilla. Beat well.
3.	STIR together flour, baking soda and salt. Add to creamed mixture. Beat on low speed until stiff dough forms.
4.	SHAPE into 1-inch balls. Roll in sugar. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheet.
5.	BAKE 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown.
6.	TOP each cookie immediately with an unwrapped chocolate piece, pressing down firmly so that cookie cracks around edge. Remove from cookie sheets to cool.

Yield: 4 Dozen Cookies

Step 1- drink till you can't remember anything the night of- check.

Step 2- Set difficulty to rookie, pound opponent in latest version of NCAA Football- in progress

Step 3- live vicariously through the victories of other teams you support less strongly later in the weak- in the pipeline.

 

What else do you guys do to deal with a tough loss?  I could use some help!

 

I suppose watching highlight reels on ESPN isn't the best idea...

I hope that someone has been archiving Missouri football history.  It would be a real shame if all these memories became mere memories, without being able to see exactly what happened.  Thankfully, the internet offers a lot to would-be archivists, and I'm hoping someone has taken the time to preserve the program's history.

 

I'm particularly interested in the following football games:

 

07 vs. Kansas

97 vs. Nebraska

08 vs. Nebraska

07 Big 12 Championship vs Oklahoma

07 Cotton Bowl

08 vs. Kansas

 

Are any of these preserved on the web anywhere?