Are You Ready for Some Football?

This post should have been titled, "Are You Ready For 9 Months of Football?"

Late last week, MLS published the 2008 schedule. Mark your calendars now for first kick on Saturday, March 29. Keep marking that calendar straight through to MLS Cup on Sunday, November 23.

Wow. A record 10 months of soccer this year. Yes, I realize the Olympics in Beijing will put the season on hold, but 10 months is a little excessive for any sport. It's also interesting the league decided to break for the Olympics when it did not do so for the World Cup in 2006.

The length of the season really only rivals NASCAR and the PGA Tour. It. Never. Ends.

A season like this raises some serious questions. First, how does MLS expect to carry interest for that long? It's a bit much to ask teams to play other conference teams 3 times in a season.

There is also a problem with injuries. Rarely are teams at full strength for an entire season. This hurts marketing if your top athletes are unavailable for extended periods of time and true fans wonder whether or not injured player(s) would have factored into the final result.

Finally, and most importantly, too many teams make the playoffs! With only 14 teams in the league (15 in '09), more than half make the playoffs each season. Under this scenario, it's way too easy. Teams can be (and routinely are) absolutely terrible in the first half of the year and put together a string of a few wins to sneak into the playoffs. Once they're in, who knows what could happen.

Will I be watching on March 29th? Sure. Just don't expect me to watch that third DC United/New York Red Bulls game on Saturday, August 30th.