A new year, a new playoff format

As another MLS season is upon us, so is a brand new playoff format.  With the addition of Vancouver and Portland the playoffs have expanded to 10 teams in order to keep with the stupid tradition of sending at least half the league into the playoffs.

The playoff system does get one thing right at least - they reward the winners of the Supporters’s Shield, but just barely.  More on that later.

This year the top 3 teams from conference will get seeded into their half of the tournament.  Then the next 4 teams reguardless of conference will be seeded #7-10.  The first round of playoffs will see #7 vs #10 and #8 vs #9.  Of those two winners the one with the lower position will go to play the Supporters’s Shied winners and the other team will play the #1 seed in the other conference.  From there everything else is pretty much like before, win and move on to play the other winners.

I would still like to see the conferences go away all together.  Why not have a single table and make the playoffs 1v8, 4v5, 3v6, 2v7?  This is an easy system to understand and it rewards the teams that do good in the regular season.  We shouldn’t need a flow chat to figure out who will play who in the MLS playoffs.

What do you think about the new playoff format?