May 2, 2008 - Notes

1) No, Sigi Schmid does not have 100 wins. Sure, if you count shootouts the same as regular victories. But that's a poor way of looking at it, as I've talked about many times before. If you don't change it, then you can't compare the first four seasons of MLS to the rest and the records get all out of whack. Hopefully, the more years MLS racks up, the more likely they''ll be able to see those first four seasons as different and update the historical records accordingly. Schmid only started coaching the Galaxy in the final year of the shootout, and he was only credited with one shootout win. So last Saturday's win over Houston should be considered his 99th. That may be a small difference, but whether it's one or one hundred, the issue remains the same. 2) BTW, by my count there are only 34 players who played in the shootout era (1996-99) left in MLS. All have 150+ appearances or more, except for Greg Sutton. The Canadian goalkeeper is also the likely record holder of the longest amount of time between MLS matches: 7 years. He played for Chicago in 1999 and 2000, last appearing for them on March 25th, 2000. His first appearance for Toronto last year was on April 7th, 2007. 3) The US Open Cup started for MLS this week. Well, qualifying anyway. Technically, that is different from the tournament proper. This means that I'm going to have to go into my stats and separate the number of appearances/goals between the "US Open Cup" and "Open Cup qualifying," which I didn't do last year (I should have). And since I'm doing that, I really need to make separate categories for each international tournament, rather than just a "continental" category like I've used in the past. I didn't post my lineup database here after last season like I normally do, in part because I've been wanting to make these changes for a while now. I have to update 17 spreadsheets (16 franchises plus overall) by changing from 4 categories (MLS-Playoffs-Open Cup-Continental) to 14 (one for each international competition). Not hard, just time consuming. I should note that the new CONCACAF Champions League is considered the same competition as the Champions Cup. However, the preliminary round before the group stage may pose a dilemma. It appears that it is considered part of the tournament proper, as they didn't use the word qualifying. Of course, the same stage in the UEFA Champions League is called qualifying and that data doesn't count in their official statistics. For example, Liverpool's Dirk Kuyt is listed as the 6th highest goalscorer with 5 goals, but that doesn't include his brace against Toulouse in the third round of qualifying. But I suppose it's up to the confederation to make the decision, and all the teams currently in the tournament are considered qualified, so that's what I'll go by. 4) YA of the Year (not a real award, unfortunately) has to go to Michael Bradley, right? Yanks Abroad currently has a poll running where he takes 73% of the vote. I think only Oguchi Onyewu could make a case for taking it instead. He's part of a team that clinched the league championship without a loss, and has only allowed 19 goals in 32 games. Plus, the Belgian league is not much worse than the Dutch league. I'd say Bradley probably takes it though, barring any major awards for Gooch in the coming weeks. Of course, I have to judge this without seeing either one play outside of small clips. Looking at that post, the interesting thing is that for this entire decade, a different YA has won every year. In this decade, I have the award going to Reyna, Stewart, O'Brien, Friedel, Howard, Beasley, Keller, McBride, and now Bradley (probably).