MLS Week 20 Recap

Good News and bad news for me over the weekend.  The good news is that I had a perfect weekend with my MLS predictions.  The bad news is that I was perfect the wrong way going 0 for 8.  This is actually pretty hard to do, but that is small consolation.  Here is a recap of the results:



Predicted Score				Actual Score				Points
Philadelphia	2	Colorado	1	Philadelphia	1	Colorado	2	-10
Vancouver	1	Los Angeles	1	Vancouver	0	Los Angeles	4	-10
Kansas City	2	New England	1	Kansas City	1	New England	1	-10
Houston	1	Seattle	1	Houston	3	Seattle	1	-10
Real Salt Lake	2	Columbus	0	Real Salt Lake	0	Columbus	2	-10
San Jose	1	D.C. United	1	San Jose	0	D.C. United	2	-10
Portland	3	Toronto FC	2	Portland	2	Toronto FC	2	-10
FC Dallas	1	Chivas USA	1	FC Dallas	1	Chivas USA	0	-10

It was an unusually bad weekend for home teams with three teams getting shut out and only two teams, Dallas and Houston winning.  Perhaps that Texas heat gave them an advantage.  Let's see how these results impacted the SRS ratings:



Team	MOV	SOS	SRS	Change
Real Salt Lake	0.684	-0.014	0.670	-0.148
Los Angeles	0.696	-0.042	0.653	0.131
FC Dallas	0.391	-0.017	0.374	0.045
Philadelphia	0.350	-0.014	0.336	-0.079
New York	0.304	-0.011	0.293	0.009
Seattle	0.304	-0.021	0.284	-0.094
Columbus	0.182	0.024	0.205	0.121
Chivas USA	0.136	0.010	0.146	-0.044
Colorado	0.083	0.027	0.111	0.070
Houston	0.000	0.019	0.019	0.121
Kansas City	0.048	-0.127	-0.080	-0.033
D.C. United	-0.200	0.056	-0.144	0.130
San Jose	-0.227	0.043	-0.185	-0.122
Chicago	-0.250	0.031	-0.219	-0.002
New England	-0.455	0.033	-0.421	0.019
Portland	-0.500	0.026	-0.474	-0.024
Vancouver	-0.591	-0.018	-0.609	-0.146
Toronto FC	-0.917	-0.003	-0.920	0.020

Real Salt Lake holds on to the top spot despite their upset loss to Columbus.  LA's big win over Vancouver puts them right behind the Claret-and-Cobalt.  They actually have the highest average margin of victory (MOV), but RSL's better strength of schedule (SOS) keeps them ahead of the Galaxy overall.