Week 7: Power Rankings by The Collective

As promised, below are the Major League Soccer (MLS) power rankings one arrives at by averaging the eight separate power rankings I came across this week. Call it the combined, reduced wisdom of The Semi-Detached Pundit Collective that kind of, sort of floats around Soccer Blogs. Here’s a list of the source material:

It's a Simple Game (LINK - me, of course)
ESPN (their collective)
Soccer by Ives (Ives Galarcep)
Sports Illustrated (Ryan Hunt)
The Other Football (Orlando Sentinel; Brant Parsons)
Sideline Views (Luis Bueno...where's Canales?)
My Soccer Blog (Mike H)
MLS Underground


I can now say with some certainty the combined totals are not simply a rehash of ESPN’s rankings - see, LA or Houston for proof of that. It also occurs to me that parsing these numbers out to the tenths (e.g. 0.1) preserves some subtle differences - for instance, this tells you that Chicago is a weak #7 and Toronto FC is generally perceived as marginally better than #11. Against that, the numbers say the Columbus Crew is a strong #12 - a situation that relies heavily on Luis Bueno’s very generous #7 ranking for the Crew. Perhaps it’s the defense?

In any case, we’re not talking about enormous differences - especially through the first six - but there are some differences worth noting in The Collective’s sense of where these teams stack up. At any rate, here’s the rankings round up:

1. New England Revolution - 1.1 (My spiteful #2 ranking breaks the pattern)
2. Red Bull New York - 2.3 (I rated ‘em high, Bueno low, but solid at #2)
3. FC Dallas - 2.8 (most folks seem pretty high on Dallas right now)
4. Kansas City Wizards - 4.4 (yep...a weak #4, but it’s incontrovertible)
5. Colorado Rapids - 4.9 (right on KC’s tail; Mike H is the outlier here)
6. DC United - 6.0 (an almost universal #6; the other two balanced)
7. Chicago Fire - 7.5 (things get interesting here; I happen to match the average)
8. Los Angeles Galaxy - 8.5 (ESPN’s was the low ranking here)
9. Houston Dynamo - 8.8 (pegged as high as #6 and low as #12 - weird)
10. Chivas USA - 10.0 (pretty precise, so it must be right....right?)
11. Toronto FC - 10.8 (solid #10s and #11s)
12. Columbus Crew - 11.1 (Pay Bueno; it’s all #11s and #12’s after him)
13. Real Salt Lake - 13.0 (as they say, #13 with a bullet; a universal pick)

All for now. We’ll see how The Semi-Detached Pundit Collective sense of things plays out from here.