It's a girl, buy some pink shit

So, apologies, I had another kiddo on Monday and it's kinda thrown my mojo off, as this isn't exactly a high priority item.

But anyway, I'm just gonna copy-pasta this from BigSoccer. Don't likey? Deal with it.

Okay, so here's last weeks ratings. Glad I'm not gonna fall too far behind, as the games next week are still gonna be part of Week 16. Had another daughter on Monday (second spawn). Home on Friday. Running on a good 10 hours of sleep in the last 72. Weeee! I love late night coffee.

Anyway, here's the numbers. Hard to take anything too seriously, as most teams "cruised" on their Week 14 rankings, but still, looks pretty good. The gulf between the top 2/3rds of the league and the bottom third (Chicago, San Jose, Chivas, Toronto and DC) is actually pretty impressive... Make of that what you will.

The table.

The graph.

And, for good measure, he's a picture of me and the new spawn. Because this is my blog, dammit.

SHFR you say?

So it's amazing how much you can get done when you throw Sesame Street on for your daughter and give your wife the new issue of Bon Appetite.

I kid, I kid... kind of.  But I did decide to actually plot the SHFr ratings for each team instead of just their rankings, for a bit more fluid indication of how teams have performed this year.

Here's hte first attempt.

No, that's not an error with SKCs initial performance. The SHFR system goes from 1,000,000 to... Whatever 1/21*1,000,000 is. 47,619, I guess. Obviously there's a lot of uncertainty at the beginning of the season, but you can see wher eexpectations where.

In order to make more sense of how teams are playing now, here's the same chart except scaled to teams for the last few weeks.

So you can see that my system, while ranking teams 1-19, isn't just based on linear rankings. There's some underlying ratings that show DC trending down, TFC and Montreal trending up, and San Jose really playing excellent soccer for the last half of the season or so...

Not much more to say about it except these were drawn up in Excel 2003, while I usually use Excel 2007... Away from my good laptop for awhile, but I'll get the charts looking prettier for the end of the season, I promise.

Can you imagine losing power in this heat?

Week's over so I iterated... is that right? Spell check says it is, so we'll go with it. Iterated the power ranking system again this week. Everything seems to check out pretty well. DC has fallen far with it's second straight loss and San Jose is riding high above everyone else, even with the loss.

Again, sort of harsh to TFC, but I think they're coming back. Conversely, Portland seems to be spiraling out of control, so here's to hoping the All-star break can help them recover whatever it is they're supposed to have.

Team	Rank	Weekly Δ	SHFR	Weekly Δ
San Jose	1	NC	150,685	-6,031
DC	2	NC	128,655	-9,502
New York	3	NC	117,647	1,625
Kansas City	4	NC	112,245	-2,509
Salt Lake City	5	NC	111,111	585
Houston	6	+1	105,769	4,320
Vancouver	7	+1	100,000	0
Chicago	8	-2	100,000	-3,448
Seattle	9	NC	96,916	-306
Columbus	10	NC	94,421	671
LA	11	NC	90,535	3,035
Philadelphia	12	NC	86,275	3,272
Chivas	13	NC	79,710	-1,059
New England	14	+1	78,292	-655
Colorado	15	-1	78,014	-2,138
Dallas	16	+1	73,333	2,388
Montreal	17	-1	70,288	-898
Portland	18	NC	68,966	-1,503
Toronto	19	NC	62,678	1,985

Congrats again to San Jose, let's see if they can keep it up.

Too late for coffee, too early for beer

Another week of MLS action in the books and a bit of soul searching needed for some teams. And I'd be remiss not to at least mention the San Jose-Los Angeles game. Great match from the highlights I saw, wish I had watched the whole thing. Hopefull that opened some eyes to outside fans.

Once more I'll preface this with some excuses. Real Salt Lake were the big losers this week but only drop two places into third. I think they'll slide a little more before too long if New York or Kansas City can get something together. Seattle also continues to fall and I imagine will settle out a place or three lower. Toronto is actually making a run at Dallas for the title of NOT WORST, but I think they've still got a ways to go.

And, yeah, a frustrating loss to Chicago at home has me a bit upset. Hopefully we cna weather the next few games without Roger and make an appearence in the MLS Cup final game, but we have to get past Philadelphia first and I don't want them looking past that game again.

At any rate, here's the table.

Week 17
Team	Rank	Weekly Δ	Rating	Weekly Δ
San Jose	1	+1	6.353	0.335
DC	2	+1	6.941	0.309
Salt Lake City	3	-2	7.294	-0.794
New York	4	NC	7.706	-0.143
Kansas City	5	NC	8.471	-0.658
Chicago	6	+2	9.294	0.393
Vancouver	7	-1	9.647	-0.335
Seattle	8	-1	10.000	-0.375
Columbus	9	NC	10.235	0.390
Houston	10	NC	10.588	0.224
Colorado	11	NC	10.941	0.309
LA	12	NC	12.059	0.191
Chivas	13	NC	12.706	0.044
New England	14	NC	12.882	0.118
Portland	15	NC	13.529	-0.279
Montreal	16	NC	13.765	-0.452
Philadelphia	17	NC	14.412	0.026
Dallas	18	NC	15.118	-0.118
Toronto	19	NC	17.824	0.614

Way to go San Jose. It might be time for me to try to pick up Wondoloski on my fantasy team again...

Monday again? I thought Monday was last week.

I've almost gotten into a roll with doing these. Scary, huh? Maybe during the office season I'll even write up a nifty little script or something to automate the whole thing and just be done with thought and effort once and for all. Were it so easy.

Anyway, here's the updated spreadsheet incoroprating the last rounds of games into the metric. A few interesting things. RSL still holds onto the top slot, but just barely, which is a bit surprising given their recent run of form and losing a direct match against San Jose. Once again this was sort of intentional as I wanted rankings to change a bit more gradually than how most of the talking heads update their rankings, but maybe in this case it's a bit too slow.

Another anomoly seems to be New York winning against a direct foe and seemingly actually dropping in ranking slightly. This seems to be because a lot of teams actually had slightly better results than their results given other teams slightly beter form then them this week. Because it's a relative system, even a good performance can result in losing some rating when compared to other, great results.

Seattle is just a hair above Chicago but they'll likely be falling a lot if they can't right their ship soon. Same for RSL. Kansas City has fallen to basically the worst of the best level. I'm still hoping a win against Dayton sets up a rematch against Philly.

I've been wondering what it will take to get Toronto to overtake Dallas as well. I feel like TFC will be winning again after the All Star break. Not sure I can say the same for Dallas...

Seattle was this weeks big loser, dropping 0.758 points while LA was the big winner, picking up 0.750. Are they back? Doubtful, but in a parity league with a playoff system all you need to do is limp across the finish line at the end of the season and who knows what can happen...

Anyway, here's the full table.

Week 16
Team	Rank	Weekly Δ	Rating	Weekly Δ
Salt Lake City	1	NC	6.5	-0.567
San Jose	2	NC	6.6875	0.313
DC	3	NC	7.25	-0.117
New York	4	+1	7.5625	-0.029
Kansas City	5	-1	7.8125	-0.613
Vancouver	6	+1	9.3125	-0.446
Seattle	7	-1	9.625	-0.758
Chicago	8	NC	9.6875	0.446
Columbus	9	+1	10.625	-0.158
Houston	10	-1	10.8125	-0.479
Colorado	11	NC	11.25	-0.583
LA	12	+1	12.25	0.750
Chivas	13	-1	12.75	0.117
New England	14	NC	13	0.200
Portland	15	NC	13.25	0.483
Montreal	16	NC	13.3125	0.554
Philadelphia	17	+1	14.4375	0.496
Dallas	18	-1	15	-0.267
Toronto	19	NC	18.4375	0.296

Real Salt Lake will get no crest love this week, as I don't think they deserve it.