Week 5: KC Love, the Power Rankings Round-Up

I've already posted my post-Week 5 power rankings, but thought I'd round-up the rest of them to better judge how "the collective" sees Major League Soccer's (MLS) teams stacking up against each other.

For lack of a better hook, call this the week of Kansas City Love - which isn't nearly dirty as it sounds (and is certainly no Cleveland Steamer). What I'm getting at, though, is nearly everyone ranks the Kansas City Wizards higher than me - notably, Sideline Views' Luis Bueno, who slotted the Wizards in at #1 (dammmmnnnn!). Allowing for the difference in format noted, El Guero on Who Ate All the Cupcakes makes it pretty clear he's placed KC just as high. Even Mike H of My Soccer Blog whose caveat on the Wizards matches my suspicions - the relative paucity of challenges to their defense - places them at #3.

Only WVHooligan joined me in capping the Wizards' rise to the #4 slot. That similar placement does not, however, grow from the same reasoning as mine: near as I can tell I was the only pundit sufficiently impressed by Houston's pounding of the Colorado Rapids to shift them into the top three. Well, almost the only one: MLS Underground plugged them pretty high, but they also had them at #5 the previous week. My increasingly transparent hostility to Chicago Fire could also play a role: nearly everyone else has them pegged at either 3 or 4, while I dumped them all the way down to a patently silly #7. Still, I'm hoping that will come good down the road.

After those points, the other notable talking point is the consensus that Red Bull's lapse against Real Salt Lake counts more as aberration than sign of things to come. And, in a neat quirk, Mike H and I sync up exactly on numbers 9-13 - then again, look at the teams and it's not such a mystery.

I'll round this out with a couple more power rankings posts and one comment: ESPN and Soccer by Ives; to paraphrase the X-Files, the truth is probably in there somewhere.

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