The Games We Play

Ah, the schedule is now up. Hooray. Let's skip past the "highlight games" of Beckham, Esky's return, and Adu, and see what areas of the schedule look rough. It looks like a brutal summer for our boys, as July through September will have six games a piece, and seven in July for any of our all-stars. July's competition looks to be especially difficult with games at Kansas City, at Houston on short rest, FC Dallas at home, the all-star game, at [the expected to be much improved] New York, and the two SuperLiga matches against the Mexican opponents. If we start well, we'll have to weather that stretch. If we don't start well...

Well, fortunately, Quarter Volley looks at the opening three games and feels that five points is the expectation level. That seems fair to me, but I'd be more comfortable with six, given that one of those games is at Columbus.

So, in the spirit of irresponsible blogging, and having looked at the schedule, I prematurely estimate a record of 14-8-8 for 50 points... which will put us second in the conference. Even as I type that, I feel like I'm being overly optimistic, but that's what I think I'm going to calibrate my "definition of success" to. We have an expansion team in our conference, which is nice. We have the Columbus Crew as well. That should be a decent number of points right there, even if we don't get three from every game (and I don't think we will.)