MLS Week 8 & 9 Wrap-Up: A Short Longitudinal That Means Nothing, Yet Satisfies Something

Roger Shewitt isn't a real name. This is Roger Schmidt.

Before Major League Soccer kicked off…what I think was its Week 8, I saw the first midweek games of the season chasing its tail and decided that a condensed schedule called for a simpler post. With that in mind, I posted 10 questions to Bluesky (9, factually) that the two games played by all the teams involved would either answer, or at least begin to answer.

The Q & ensuing A are below, with some amount of riffing thrown in. Nothing of what’s below provides comprehensive coverage, it’s intended as a snapshot for a couple handfuls of events (aka, games). This could become a model for the league-wide posts. I typically know about 12 hours before you do, fwiw. Let’s get do it, let’s get down to it, Roger…Shewitt.

1) What Happens on Inter Miami CF’s Post-Mascherano Rocky Mountain Road Trip Swing?
At least the Colorado Rapids made the MLS brass’s very special boy/team work for the win. They beat them by the numbers, too, and my Bluesky timeline was full of praise for Matt Wells and Rafael Navarro’s savvy slipperiness. Miami scored the late winner through Messi, of course, but they seemed no less determined to feed German Berterame until he scored a damn goal (which he did). Despite the offside (by a fucking toenail) goal that RSL had called back, the Rocky Mountain rivalry’s Western-most team looked more rattled than I’ve seen them so far in 2026. It took them ferever to do it, but Miami won that one comfortably on goals by well-heeled opening acts like Rodrigo de Paul (82nd minute) and Luis “Ear-Biter” Suarez (83rd). “Indifferent form” means different things to different teams, but, in case you missed it, Miami hasn’t lost since Match Day 1 and they’re now 2nd in the East right behind Nashville. If this team sees a slump in 2026, looks like it’ll come later.

2) Do Either Toronto or New England Have the (or Any) Juice?
New England answered with a throaty “YYYEeesssssss!!” with dueling 2-1 wins – versus Columbus last weekend and at Atlanta last night – while Toronto answered with what can best be characterized as an animated shrug by way of back-to-back, thrilling 3-3 draws versus Austin and Philadelphia. I didn’t see anything from the Austin draw (though the final stats tell me I should have put in the time), but I saw that Philly gave Toronto a fight they merely survived thanks to a last-gasp, thoroughly gorgeous equalizer by their ‘keeper, Luka Gavran (who, based on what I saw, only stayed as high as he did at Kobe Franklin’s urging). Shit was thin, in other words, and it’s still just two points from as many games and…well, sixth place isn’t so bad, even if 11th is a mere three points below. Toggling to the other team, the Revs’ win versus Columbus had me asking whether the latter is just a bad team (they actually did a nose better by the stats) and seeing any team up to and including a random collection of fans and stadium vendors beat Atlanta should surprise no one at this point (shout-out to Sergey Miranchuk, who’s doing really well after a bad 2025!); that’s all to say the opposition always matters. Going the other way, both wins count as New England taking care of business, they’ve charted their own fate all the way up to third in the East…even if that followed from beating every (or just four) of the East’s worst teams (MTL, DC, CLB, ATL), three of them at home. Still, juice is juice.

Question Between the Margins: which is the worst team in MLS between SKC and Atlanta?

If you know, you know. Fwiw, I do not.

3) FC Dallas Plays Its 7th Home Game by [4/22]. Can They Points-Max v LA & Minnesota?
Nope. Dallas came out of Weeks 8 & 9 with the lone point they picked up versus the LA Galaxy and by the literally saving grace of Petar Musa. I have a terrible tendency to get over-excited about middling teams and these two match days saw Dallas join Red Bull and NYCFC as teams I’ve so far overrated in theis early 2026 season. I’ll address those other teams in future posts (maybe; no guarantees), but Dallas suffers from the familiar problem of failing to win. A three-game winless streak doesn’t help, of course, but picking up a piddling two points from three straight homes against St. Louis, LA Galaxy and Minnesota speaks to something less than a bright future. Possibly related, Dallas has just 10 homes games left against 15 on the road (against that, they’re 1-1-0, aka, 50/50 on the road so far). Early returns make it look like the West will be the more upstairs/downstairs MLS conference in 2026. The more that holds, the more Dallas’ accidental indifference to winning feels like a curse.

Note Between the Margins: I posted something cryptic to Bluesky last night about the Timbers needing to keep pace with the Texas teams. I don’t see Portland breaking into the Top 6 (or 7) in the West and I expect both Dallas and Houston to fight for 7th through 9th, so I think whatever chance Portland has of getting into the playoffs – and who knows what from there – follows from keeping up with and ultimately getting ahead of Texas’s finest (in re Austin; see below).

4) Does LAFC San Jose Fully Seize the Crown?
San Jose slipped into the header for this section because they answered the question for LAFC by (based on the highlights) fucking rolling them in LA (the final stats paint a gentler rogering). LAFC followed up their second loss in succession (and, contra broadcast booth mythology, it was Portland who scored the first league goal versus LAFC, thankyouverymuch) with a tepid draw at Colorado. San Jose, on the other hand, kicked the doors, paints and dildoes out of Austin FC, even if it took them until the 75th to get the ball rolling. For the record, I watched all the wrong minutes of the win over Austin, but I still saw them ramp up what turned out to be a historic number of shots, which led to something like the highest xG ever recorded. At this point in the season, asking how LAFC’s doing overlooks the biggest story of the early 2026 – i.e., whatever the flaming energy juice got into San Jose this year. If Bruce Arena goes out with a bang, I’m 1,000% here for it. Go off, old man.

Concerned.

5) Which Surprise Eastern Conference Laggard Gets Off Life Support, Esp. Absent Opportunities for Cannibalism? (The Teams: Columbus, Philly, Orlando and Cincinnati.)
With all four teams currently posted at (in the order listed above) 9th, 14th, 12th and 11th, this question always boiled down more to curiosity than relevance – and I mean that in the old freak show sense. (Fwiw, I don’t recommend every seeing an actual freak show; oh, the story I could tell.) Both Orlando and Columbus reached their lowly rungs on the ladder with midweek wins (congrats and congrats, respectively), Cincinnati with two wild-ass draws that makes you simultaneously question Pat Noonan’s sanity and job security, while Philly got there on a draw to dull to investigate (0-0, crucially versus DC) and their aforementioned, totally came-to-play draw at Toronto. And yet…

Note Between the Margins: It is very, very early in the season and, with 6th in the East held on a measly 13 points (by Toronto), calling the underbelly of the Eastern Conference soft feels like a fair descriptor. In all honesty, I feel like everything up to third (aka, New England) feels reasonably in reach for any of these four teams if/when they get their shit together.

6) Does Austin FC Fall Off the Map?
A bit, yeah. Even if having the league leaders drop a record-breaking loss on your local team hurts a little (or a lot; still, this is San Jose’s fifth 3+ goal win this season), there’s not a ton of shame in that or in a fighting 3-3 draw at Toronto. Austin’s problem is cumulative, and in a way that should terrify Portland Timbers fans. Despite one of MLS’s most (locally) celebrated backstops (Stuuuuv) and investing heavily in untried players like Mytro Uzuni and tried players like Facundo Torres and (the still injured, yes?) Brandon Vazquez, Austin’s down deep enough in a West – and in a way that, to my biased eyes, looks less salvageable than what I see in Portland’s lineup/future. That could be embarrassingly wrong, no question, but I really do think that the top 6-7 in the West is going to hold…which sets up an incredibly vicious, if mildly depressing scrum for the last two playoff/playoff-adjacent spots in the West.

Listen to Wil Wheaton.

7) Is RSL Fer Real in 2026 (If Just Up to the (EVIL) World Cup Break?)
Despite what happened versus Miami, Real Salt Lake has made a strong early case for the most exciting team in 2026, if after San Jose. Prior to the loss versus Miami, they’d gone 5-0-1. Sure, that involved beating some crap teams in advantageous places – e.g., Austin and SKC, both at home – but RSL also beat both Seattle and San Diego at home, as well as drawing the latter in San Diego. Asking whether they’re “fer real” jumps the gun a little, but I kept them among the Top 6 in the MLS West for a reason. The young talent has looked two seasons better than Red Bull’s so far and I think it has a fair shot at carrying them to the playoffs…at which point their inexperience will consume them like some fast-burn drug in a dystopian novel…

8) Does NYCFC Catch Up to Nashville FC (Over a Pair of Tricky Match Days?)
I’m calling this another somewhat unexpected “no” – though, per my note about overrating teams above, should it have been? The foundational theory is that NYCFC has long been a strong home team. That alone felt like enough to expect a minimum of four points from back-to-back home games versus Charlotte and a hard-struggling FC Cincy. Instead, NYC lost versus Charlotte and it took one of the worst games I’ve seen from Roman Celentano and a couple miracles for them to draw Cincy (if it's not in here, what's the point?). Because, again, the East is squishy as the worst bed you (or just I) have ever slept on, I don’t want to make too much of this, but getting just one point out of those two games felt notable for a team with NYCFC’s history of sucking on the road.

9) Which Way San Diego?
They went with down. My latest impressions of San Diego include the aforementioned Utah mugging and kind of sad (see Hector Herrera not having the juice to finish into an empty net from 40 yards out) and wayward loss at Houston. They’ll miss Amahl Pellegrino for the game against Portland – which, for what it’s worth, hurts them in my mind – and the overall trend points to a team that needs all hands available to so much as pick their noses. They’ve lost four straight, all against Western Conference rivals, if with most of them pretty challenging presently (SJ, MIN, RSL, HOU) and three on the road (MIN was a home game). If I had to sum up San Diego right now, I’d call them a team that’s finding its level, but in a bad way.

I’m calling it a wrap at No. 9. The OG No. 10 was “surprises,” but I feel like I covered the good ones above. Regular service should(?) resume next week. Till Sunday…