How bad was your team against the Eastern Conference, by the numbers?

Yes children, gather ‘round the fire for another annual discussion of Bestern Conference vs Leastern Conference. Every year the internet is aflame with fans proclaiming their conference as the best conference, and the other conference is trash. Time to acknowledge my own bias here, being a Western Conference Team fan, but that said I’ll try to set that aside for now and stick to the data.

A few years ago, the USL super smart kid John Morrissey said something that I like to fall back on frequently:

“The average team in the West is better than the average team in the East.”

Before you bust out your pitchforks and torches, go subscribe to Backheeled and let John know he’s full of it over there. Leave me out of it.

The Top Level

At the most fundamental level, the East beat up on the West this year pretty soundly, with the West ending only 45-64-35 (WLD) in 2024. In 2023, the West went 60-47-35. It wasn’t even close last year, with Orange County SC, Sacramento Republic, and San Diego Loyal (RIP) collectively earning 20-6-10. In 2024, the top three teams, New Mexico United, Memphis 901 FC, and Oakland Roots, only earning 17-13-6. It’s a stark difference from the prior year, but perhaps illuminates what many fans and players have been saying for a while:

It’s tough to travel in USL; and it’s even tougher traveling cross-conference.

Home versus Away

When we drill down a little further, we start to see where Western teams really struggled: away games. While they were mostly even at home, Western teams playing away only mustered a 19-42-13 record. This stands in stark contrast to 2023, when Western teams dominated at home and almost broke even on the road.

It’s tempting to lay blame at the feet of a few teams, but, across the board, every Western team performed slightly worse than 2023, with the exception of two teams: Las Vegas Lights and Oakland Roots, . Yes, the Lights were awful last year, winning exactly zero cross-conference games, and improved this year to going 3-6-3 combined with a total 12 cross-conference points earned (a 200% improvement). Roots were also slightly better cross-conference, earning a 5-5-2 record, and 17 points (30% improvement)

While most other teams took approximately 1/3 less points this year, one team leads the pack: Monterey Bay Union. Monterey Bay earned a 1-8-3 record against Eastern teams earnings 6 points and posting a 64% drop from 2023’s cross-conference schedule.

Problem Children

There is of course one problem here. Across the entire Western Conference we’re not comparing apples to apples. The West lost San Diego Loyal and Rio Grande Valley Toros at the end of 2023 for reasons we won’t get into here. We gained Memphis 901 FC and FC Tulsa as part of the West, which really I have to write it as “West” because those teams are in the East. The geographical arguments of the Western Conference can be made on a different day, but again, just based on the numbers, they’re both odd little birds.

Tulsa did not fare well this year in either conference, but I can realistically blame that on the on-again/off-again nature of their schedule. If I remember correctly, there was a point they had four games-in-hand. That’s crazy talk. I don’t know enough about it to know if that was a problem with their venue or what. But still: very odd. Either way, they got beat up by the East and didn’t fare well with their new Western opponents either., mustering only 2-7-3 cross-conference, and only nine wins total on the season.

Memphis 901, on the other hand… Memphis only managed two home wins against Eastern Conference foes, BUT when travelling to decidedly closer opponents, scraped up four wins and three loses, leading them to a 14-11-9 record overall and a third place berth in the Western Conference. I opened above with anecdotal evidence of players talking about how difficult it is to travel for away games: non-direct flights, long layovers, expensive flying into regional airports opposed to hubs, sometimes long bus trips to the host city. It all adds up and impacts player performance. Memphis seemed to weather the travel challenges better in the Eastern Conference than with their Western Conference foes (because, again, they’re not in the West). This could point to the accuracy of player statements and one of the challenges of traveling to the west with its more spread out metropolitan areas, separated by large expanses of “wilderness.”

But hey, I’m not a sports scientist, nor a data scientist, so maybe the correlation is there, maybe it’s not. I want to see more data over a longer period than just two years to really draw any firm conclusions. While Eastern Conference fans may take this as a sign that the East is better, it might also just be that traveling east sucks. The West needs more teams and it would behoove USL HQ to figure it out.

So What?

Does the East being “better” in the regular season mean they win the Championship? They’ve been better before and lost in the Final. The last four USL Champions have been Western teams (Monarchs, Orange County, San Antonio, Phoenix Rising). This writer’s contention is that there is more parity in the west, like John said above, so Western teams beat up on each other all season instead of having two or three really good teams at the top, accumulating results off the backs of a bunch of average teams below them. Meanwhile, in the West, almost any team can beat almost any other team in a given contest. Memphis beat New Mexico United and Switchbacks beat Republic just last week.

I guess we’ll find out on November 23rd on Big CBS.