A Quarter into the MLR Season, Who's Good?

With a quarter of the MLR season in the books, everyone is still trying to nail down exactly who is good and who isn't. We're starting to have some idea - my power rankings suggest that San Diego is very good right now, for example - but there are still a lot of question marks. As my podcast co-host John Fitzpatrick has pointed out, San Diego may be at the top, but who have they really played?

That's actually a question answerable with data, so lets have a dive in.

The Leaders and the Pack

Let's start with a simple observation: right now, you can divide the league into two groups: the Leaders and the Pack. The Leaders are the top 4 teams at the moment: San Diego, Chicago, Utah, and Houston. San Diego is undefeated, and the other three all have at least one win against one of the other Leaders. Importantly, none of these teams have lost to any of the teams in the Pack.

The Pack, obviously, is everyone else. In 11 matches against the Leaders, they've won none of them.

However, there are a couple of teams that throw a little wrinkle in this clear story. San Diego, while they have never lost to a Pack team, also haven't won against a Leader team. All four of their matches so far have come against the Pack so they haven't had the opportunity to prove themselves against the best, which has led to the "ain't played nobody" narrative. In a couple weeks, San Diego will play Houston followed by Chicago the week after, giving them a chance to confirm their status as a leader.

The other team is Old Glory. Like San Diego, they haven't actually lost to any team in the Pack, which suggests that they should be in the Leaders group. However, they also haven't beaten any of the Leaders yet, which puts them squarely in the Pack. And their next five matches are against Pack teams, leaving them without another opportunity to gain that win for a while. Still, if they were to run that slate without a loss then perhaps they'd be deserving of Leader consideration anyway, much like San Diego.

To put it in table form:

Second order wins and losses

Another way of slicing the data is to look at second order wins. If team A beats team B and team B has a record of 2-3, then the team A gets 2 second order wins. If team A were to lose instead, then they would get 3 second order losses. This gives a rough measure of how good the wins a team has are, and how bad the losses. Beating teams that lose a lot won't gain you much, and losing to teams that win a lot won't hurt too much.

Here are the second order wins and losses so far in 2025:

This really just confirms what we figured out with the previous table, but does bring some interesting nuance. San Diego can't really be faulted for who was on their schedule, and they've done what they needed to do against that schedule. Still, they also haven't really played anyone dangerous yet, and their second order wins reflect that.

Old Glory's weird position in the middle is also reflected here. Their low second order losses show that they've handled business against the teams they should beat, but the low second order wins say that they have yet to beat a team of note. Once again one column suggests they should be in the Leader group, the other suggests they should be in the Pack. Only time will tell.

This table also highlights just how dire the situation is for the bottom of the table. NOLA and Anthem have only one win between them, and it was NOLA beating Anthem, which means that they have zero second order wins.

Second order table points

Another variation of this is to take second order table points: basically, you get the table points earned of anyone you beat, and the table points conceded of anyone you lose to. I won't dive into this one too much, because the story is pretty much the same. NOLA, Miami, and Seattle get cast in a slightly better light, Old Glory and New England garner more skepticism, and San Diego gets the clearer endorsement of quality missing from the other tables. Fundamentally, though, it's not enough to change the earlier analysis.