London Trip Almost Over; Playoff Changes; Commercial Campaign

Tomorrow the Quakes are scheduled to return to San Jose. They finish up their 10 days in London with a 2-1 record for their exhibition games. The team beat the Tottenham reserves and Colchester United, while losing to Leicester City. The Colchester United and Leicester City games were mainly games for the trialists. First team players played for at least a half in the games, but the Quakes team was mainly comprised of trialists. During the 3 games Wondo scored twice, Lenhart scored twice, Gjertsen scored once, and trialists McLoughlin and Luzunaris scored two and one goals, respectively. The trialists had a good showing in England, as did members of the first team.


Here is the new playoff format for the next few seasons. When Don Garber talked about tweaking the playoff format by adding two extra teams, I thought that the NFL’s playoff format was something that could easily be tweaked for our MLS needs. Now, in the NFL playoffs, the two Wildcard teams play the 3rd and 4th ranked divisional leaders. Here is what the NFL playoff tree looks like:

So the difference between the two is that the MLS wildcards will play to face the Western/Eastern Conference Champions. This works out well and also ensures that at least 1 Western/Eastern team will be playing in their respective Conference Championship game. We won’t wind up with something like last season where Colorado and San Jose were playing for the Eastern Conference Championship. Another benefit/concern is that the wild card teams will have to play an extra game during the playoffs. Assuming a wild card team wins the MLS Cup, they will have to play 5 games total. But one of the seeded teams would only have to play 4 games. This is the benefit Garber was talking about for Conference winners, as well as ranked teams 1-3. They won’t have to play as many games as the wild card teams. I’m excited to see who gets in this year and what happens.

The Earthquakes have started their new commercial campaign for the beginning of the season. Right now the tagline for the Quakes is, “Did you feel that?” Obviously a play on the name of the club, Earthquakes. If you’re not a local fan, the commercial campaign with this tagline features accidents in everyday life that feature the tagline with a Richter Scale measurement. Then you see a goal scored by a Quakes player or something else that’s impressive with the tagline and a measurement in the 9s. So the new campaign is “Earthquake vs. _____” There are 3 commercials which have been filmed and are out on the website. They are fun commercials.

My favorite is the last one with Convey and the Galaxy/Vuvuzela guy.

Coming up in the next few weeks is a return to San Jose for more training. The team heads down to San Luis Obispo to play Colorado in an exhibition game on March 4 I think. Opening day is getting closer and closer.

GO QUAKES!

Category: Offseason Chat, Player News, Preseason, Videos