Backpass: The Downward Spiral
Bad stretches happen. But what's the difference between 'a bad stretch' and 'a fatal blow'? How close can you dance to the vortex of despair and survive?
I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of current and active Rapids fans have no recollection of the team’s only trophy: the 2010 MLS Cup. Matt Pollard and I certainly don’t have a firsthand recollection of it; neither of us were Colorado residents in 2010. That hasn’t stopped Matt and I from interviewing players from that era in a desire to document history.
Most current Rapids fans, then, have only since glimpses of success. The 2016 team that made it to the Western Conference finals. The 2021 team that finished first in the Western Conference. That’s about it for success in the past decade.
Other than that, Colorado has been middlin’-to-bad at soccer. In any and every season, good or bad, teams go through down times - losing streaks; winless streaks; general stretches of misery. The Rapids are currently locked in one of those cold spells, as the team’s last 8 games have resulted in a fairly disappointing 2-1-5 record. Yes, the win on Saturday was a hopeful sign. But it’s still just one win amidst a sea of underwhelming results.
A question I have is: how do cold streaks in the past decade correspond to end-of season results for the burgundy boys? How much should we panic? What might we expect for the remaining 11 (non-Leagues Cup) games? Let’s take a look at the last ten seasons to see how strong a correlation there is between one bad stretch of games and that stretch being indicative of (or really, part of the cause of) an entirely bad season.1
[Note: could I have gone back further? Yes. However, 1) ten is a nice round number, 2) I wasn’t around to witness any of the games before 2013, and 3) from 1996 to 1999, there were no ties in MLS; from 2000 to 2006, there were 30, 28, 26, and 30 games played. For consistency’s sake, the last ten seasons seemed more comparable to things now.]
The Edge of the Vortex of Despair .. is Seven Points in Eight Games
The three seasons with the most similar bad runs of form to the Rapids current seven-points-in-eight-games stretch are: 2016 (a 2-3-3 stretch, 9 points); 2022 (a 1-3-4 stretch, 6 points); and 2024 (a 3-0-5 stretch, 9 points).2 Colorado made the playoffs in two out three of those years. In other words, if your worst eight game run in a season results in only 7 points (hint: our current eight game run-of-form), odds are decent that you’ll make the playoffs.
The important thing to note here for our purposes is that this is as bad as you are allowed to be. Anytime in the last decade the Rapids have had an eight game run with six or fewer total points (2015; 2017, 2018, 2019; 2023, 2023) they did not make the playoffs. On some level, that last win over Vancouver might really have made a difference – if that had been an L, the Rapids worst eight game streak of the year would be a 4-pointer. The Rapids can be as bad as this last eight games. They cannot be worse, or they’ll be playing golf in mid-October instead of football.
Your Worst Streak Doesn’t Define You - But it sort-of Does
Looking at losing streaks, this season, Colorado had two mildly panic inducing tailspins: a three-game losing streak in May against DC United, San Jose, and San Diego, and another bad three-game turn from 5/28 to 6/14 against Portland, Austin, and Orlando. That’s also pretty close to the upper boundary of how bad you can be and still make the playoffs. Colorado had a four-game losing streak in 2024 and still made the playoffs. But they did the same thing (losing four in a row) in 2015 and finished dead-last.
I remember 2015 well. It was a bad year. Marcelo Sarvas looked like he was playing in molasses - like he had both lost a step and was a half-second behind the game in terms of reactions. The team rolled out James Riley and Michael Harrington at fullback, and both were beaten by unsympathetic forwards on the regular. Riley was done in MLS after 2025. Harrington hung on for two more years with the Chicago Fire: including a 2017 Chicago Fire team that featured Bastian Schweinsteiger and Dax McCarty aboard, as well as an 18-year-old rookie named Djordje Mihailovic.
This season does bear an uncomfortable resemblance, streak-wise, to the 2022 season, in which Colorado was never truly terrible. They never lost more than two games in a row. The problem was, they lost back-to-back games four times. The ‘Pids finished 4 points shy of the playoffs that year; the last year that only seven teams from each conference made it. A brutal stretch of multiple double game weeks in August resulted in six games, 3 draws, 3 losses for Colorado, and a hot September/October where the team went 3-1-1 wasn’t good enough to get them back into the playoff mix.
This season, nine teams in each conference make the playoffs. The eighth and ninth place teams play a one-game ‘Wild Card’ playoff match, and first round teams get to contend a best-of-three, home/away/home series. This is a format I hate, but I get why they do it. It sells tickets. Because if your team finishes seventh, you don’t have to buy a plane ticket to see them.
Colorado is right on the bubble right now. They have 29 points, but also have a game in-hand (or two) over every team below them. With 11 games to go, avoiding a bad streak might make all the difference.
Or, a lack of cold streaks and a possible good season. I know there haven’t been many.
We are going to exclude 2020, with a 1-4-3 stretch 7 points. It is similar, but the effect of that short streak was outsized because the 2020 season was only 18 games due to Covid.