2014 Schedule Released

Better late than never with this post.  Yesterday MLS released the season schedule, the earliest its ever been released.  As expected this is the same home/away splits we played in 2012, and the exact opposite of last year's.  That means long road trips to the Eastern Conference (NY, Toronto, Philly, New England, and DC) and 2 away games in Vancouver, Seattle, Salt Lake, and Dallas.  The Rapids season starts on my birthday for a second year (though last year's start was actually delayed to the day after my birthday due to the blizzard).  This year we start in San Jose followed a week later by a trip to New York before we finally have our home opener on March 22nd against Portland.  We end the season, for the 3rd straight year, in Vancouver after a home finale against Dallas.

In-between the schedule breaks down like this:

• A 3 week break in June during the World Cup.  We play at Dallas on the 7th then don't have another game until we host Vancouver on the 28th.
• The only other weekend we have off is Aug. 23rd & 24th, though we do host LA on Wednesday Aug. 20th.
• Two 3-game-in-8-days streaks.  Sunday June 1st through Saturday June 7th where we play Houston, Chicago, and @Dallas before heading into the World Cup break and Saturday July 26th through Saturday August 2nd where we play Chivas USA, @New England, and our loan home Rocky Mountain Cup match against FSL.  Not the ideal scenario to face our rivals.
• The other two RMC matches in Salt Lake are Saturday May 17th and Friday September 19th.
• 5 games on NBC Sports Network and 2 each on UniMas and Univision Deportes.  Presumably Altitude will have all the rest plus English versions of the Spanish-language national games.
• One streak of 3 straight home games (May 24th through June 4th), otherwise we're never more than back-to-back at home or on the road.
• This early in the off-season is too soon to figure out which teams are going to be tough and which should be expected wins.  Hard to get past the fact that our final 10 matches are all against Western Conference foes, playing all of them once and LA and Seattle twice.  Regardless of our playoff standing going into that final run we could change it significantly after that 10 game set.