Level Set 10, Colorado Rapids: Busted Clocks, Somehow Getting Less Reliable

Feel this really fits the theme.

What follows is a brief history of Colorado Rapids, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed on both sides of that and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., before First Kick 2026. You should count on things happening between here and there.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

Thumbnail History
MLS’s highest franchise, the Colorado Rapids, have just two trophies (that aren’t the Rocky Mountain Cup) in their trophy case after 30 seasons in the league - and yet, they’re weirdly successful in the grand scheme of MLS History, at least according the janky little scale noted above. Turns out, giving the right time just twice a day is all it takes to make that happen. Consider the following: they won MLS Cup once (2010; a weird one due to the seeding process) and have felt the shameful sting of the Wooden Spoon exactly one time, way back the league’s first season (1996), but they also won their one and only U.S. Open Cup the season immediately after. Virtually all of that follows from coming out of backside of absolutely nowhere and doing something wild and weird – e.g., reaching the Western Conference final in 2016 and 2021 – with a little jumping out of the bushes to swipe the Western Conference title thrown in (2021 again). The “backside of nowhere” applies because Colorado whiffs entirely on post-season play more often than not – e.g., 12 times over the past 20 season. Still, those rare, great seasons gives the Rapids a certain kind of superpower: they scramble expectations for every other Western Conference team, if mostly during the regular season. Moreover, they pull off that magic trick on a shoestring budget - e.g., paying (the now-departed; more later) Djordje Mihailovic $3 million going into 2023, a record signing that held until they bumped the record to (maybe) $3.5 million for Rafael Navarro in the middle of 2024 (great deal so far). Their most famous players used to be goalkeepers – e.g., Tim Howard, Zac Steffen(?) - defenders – e.g., Marcelo Balboa, Drew Moor, – or defensive midfielders – e.g., Pablo Mastroeni. A couple dozen players could squeeze onto the very short list above if one wanted to go deeper (see Colorado’s (gently-outdated) all-time roster and build your own!), but the Rapids have often been a spine of a team waiting for attacking legs and arms to make them complete and dangerous enough to make one of those semifinals runs. The most famous example was the attacking duo of Omar Cummings and Conor Casey, who led them to MLS Cup 2010. The relative absence of famous names on the Rapids’ other two, post-2010 “glory teams” – i.e., the one that mounted the 2016 semifinal run (Shkelzen Gashi? Dillon Powers? Axel Sjoberg?) or 2021’s Western Conference-winning roster (Jack Price? Danny Wilson? The season that sold everyone on Lalas Abubakar before…yeah) – goes back to the point I’m making about the Rapids franchise overall: there is no way to see their next good season coming, but that season will abruptly become a major obstacle standing between your local team and a shot at glory.

Colorado Rapids Scouting Report: Of Mirages & Mobility

Oasis or thirst-induced madness?

They did slip a bit last season, but that’s so 2024. It’s time to talk about this season and the…

Colorado Rapids
2-0-2, 8 pts., 6 gf, 4 ga (+2); home 0-0-1, away 2-0-1
Last Results: DDWW
Strength/Location of Schedule
@ STL (0-0 D); v FCD (3-3 D); @ ATX (1-0); @ SJ (2-1)

Big Picture
Tricky to frame, honestly. The Rapids’ results have improved (see above) but the highlights tell me that they needed every inch of Zac Steffen to earn even a draw last weekend at the San Jose Earthquakes – and he made a minimum of three implausible saves, so here’s to hoping Steffen’s drowning his sorrows with the rest of the U.S. Men’s National Team’s after that choke versus Panama (karma, motherfuckers). I didn’t watch a ton of Colorado in real-time – just the San Jose highlights and about 50 minutes of their weird ‘n’ wild 3-3 home draw versus FC Dallas a couple weeks back – but I saw the Rapids defending to the opposition defensive third, even in the snippets against the ‘Quakes, and aggressively all over the field. Working those young legs, apparently, and those have carried them to a solid run of results, fourth in the Western Conference and seventh overall. Something else I noticed: Colorado leaves a fair amount (read: a lot) of vertical space between that skirmishing front line and the back four (arguably led to this Dallas goal). That hasn’t caused them to bleed goals so far – even with that draw versus Dallas, they average just one goal against/game – and I’ll pick at reasons not named Zac Steffen below. Against that, they needed all of Dallas’ flaws to get that home draw and I’d call them damned lucky to win at San Jose (could easily have lost by the looks of it). I wouldn’t go so far as to call their record a mirage, not yet, but the Rapids are factually picking points off direct rivals in their climb up the table.

Getting Reacquainted with the Colorado Rapids, MLS's Broken Clocks

It's nine ten somewhere, mother...shit. Never mind.

Thumbnail History
MLS’s highest franchise, the Colorado Rapids, have just two trophies (that aren’t the Rocky Mountain Cup) in their trophy case after 29 seasons in the leg. So, one may ask, what the flaming hell are they doing as the seventh team in this series? To explain the title, Colorado is like a team that gives the right time twice a day, and just twice. Consider the following: they won MLS Cup once (2010) and have felt the shameful sting of the Wooden Spoon exactly one time, way back the league’s first season (1996); the only other MLS Cup they competed in arguably doesn’t count, coming as it did in the second season (1997), even if they won their one and only U.S. Open Cup that same season. What sets them apart, even if by a thin margin, comes with the fact that they have this thing where they come out of backside of absolutely nowhere and do something wild and weird like reach the semifinals in the playoffs (2016 and 2021), or maybe they jump out of the bushes and swipe the Western Conference title (okay…yes, that’s 2021 again). To be clear, yes, I understand that fans of this team sees opportunities to brag less often than Americans elect their next president (hold that thought; might not hold for long), but every one of those rare, great seasons gives the Rapids a certain kind of superpower: they scramble expectations for all the teams around them, if mostly during the regular season, and mainly in the Western Conference. Part of that follows from the challenges of drawing top talent to a (no offense) backwater market and with an historically tight-fisted front office writing the invites - e.g., paying $3 million for Djordje Mihailovic going into 2023 was their record signing until they bumped it to (maybe) $3.5 million for Rafael Navarro in the middle of 2024 (great deal so far). Their most famous players used to be goalkeepers – e.g., Tim Howard, Zac Steffen(?) - defenders – e.g., Marcelo Balboa, Drew Moor, Jeff Larentowicz(?) – or defensive midfielders – e.g., Pablo Mastroeni. A couple dozen players could squeeze onto the very short list above if one wanted to go deeper (see Colorado’s (gently-outdated) all-time roster and build your own!), but the Rapids have often been a spine of a team waiting for attacking legs and arms to make them complete and dangerous enough to make one of those semifinals runs. As implied above, they do pull it off now and then, with the most famous example being the attacking line of Omar Cummings and Conor Casey, who led them to MLS Cup 2010. The relative absence of famous names on the Rapids’ other two, post-2010 “glory teams” – i.e., the one that mounted the 2016 semifinal run (Shkelzen Gashi? Dillon Powers? Axel Sjoberg?) or 2021’s Western Conference-winning roster (Jack Price? Danny Wilson? The season that sold everyone on Lalas Abubakar before…yeah) – goes back to the point I’m making about the Rapids franchise overall: there is no way to see their next good season coming, but that season will abruptly become one more obstacle standing between your local team and a shot at glory.

And if that doesn’t completely explain why I placed them seventh in their series, here’s the rest: they have consistently been the same team throughout their history in MLS and, unlike the rest of the originals coming up, they have enjoyed some form of success over the past 10 seasons.

Colorado Rapids 2-1 Portland Timbers: You Can't Always Get What You Want

Wants and expectations do a weird little dance toward the end of every American spectator sports season – and, let’s face it, the fact they unfailingly end in playoffs lumps them all into the same species. On the one hand, you know that your local team could really use the unlikely win…but doesn’t that adjective, “unlikely,” speak to the reality of the situation?

After a season of reducing the Colorado Rapids to a wholly-owned subsidiary of their very own, the Portland Timbers finally lost a game to the Rapids when it mattered most. The 2-1 final score hints at the respectably tight final outcome, but I doubt even one Timbers fan cares, what with Portland at the bottom of a deeper hole, seven teams above them, Minnesota United FC breathing down their necks and the already playoff-bound Los Angeles Galaxy coming to call on Wednesday…

…run-on sentences suggest urgency.

The Basics
What could have been, you know? Had Jonathan Rodriguez buried that first-minute breakaway, had the offside flag not gone up, if pigs could fly and sing “Hurdy Gurdy Man” as they whisked around the sky, maybe Portland gets that early goal and tees up an early Timbers lead. That’s how every meeting between these two teams have played out in their two games in 2024 and, oh, how that has fucked over Colorado at a 4:1 ratio. The early goal fell on the Rapids’ side of the ledger instead – more on that goal later - which left Portland chasing them for a change. It took just 10 minutes for the Timbers to catch them, and on a far better goal, and the game settled into a back-and-forth duel with decent chances falling on both sides.

Portland's best chances fell to Antony, Colorado's to Rafael Navarro: anyone familiar with either team can tell you how that panned out…I kid, I kid. Frustrated as he made anyone with green and gold in their veins, I won’t shit on Antony too hard – more on that later, too. When the goal came, it turned less on something special from Navarro than on Portland’s and/or Juan David Mosquera’s catastrophic failure to mark a player of his (demonstrated) quality on a set-piece.