Major League Soccer has updated their playoff format for 2019 to a March Madness style single elimination tournament that will take roughly a month play out. The prior competition used a combination of single elimination and home and away ties over a month and a half period, and had long breaks in the action. The one clear benefit of this change is the shortened duration of the tournament. Avoiding the November international window will create a compact and uninterrupted tournament that should improve the momentum of the story lines that emerge.

The new format is also supposed to benefit the higher seeds, as the single elimination games will give advantage to the home teams, versus the old method of home and away legs for each team. This seemingly makes regular season games more important. More Victory! [Insert scratching record sound here]. These types of simplifying statements make my geek antenna start to hone in on theoretical galaxies of mathematics. Sadly, the only off switch I have for my antenna is my keypad and a Google docs session. So let’s dig in and deconstruct this new tournament bracket and see who benefits and who does not.