Guess the Starting XI - Week 18 (San Jose) & Midseason Awards

Welcome back everyone, we’ve made it to the halfway mark of the MLS season!

This means that we’ve had a bit of math to do at Guess the Starting XI, as we prepared to hand out our Midseason awards.

As you’ll recall, the season has been split into four quarters (7-10-10-7) and for each of these quarters, we’re allowing some lowest score forgiveness, with one mulligan in each of the 7 match windows, and two mulligans in each of the 10 match windows. These “no score” weeks have now been applied to everyone's standings (for the second quarter) and will be reflected in the first half points totals.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the Midseason standings! The first table is your scores for the last ten matches, the second table is the cumulative standings so far this year.

As was the case at the end of the first quarter, Isabelt sits on top of the standings, albeit this time with a much larger margin over the closest competitor, as it’s gone up from just 4 points to 17. So far this year, Isablet has been averaging 14.2 points per match week, impressive!

Beneath the top spot, the battle for the podium positions is incredibly tight, as you can see, with 4 contestants within 2 points of second place. With seven contestants within 30 points of the lead, there’s lots to play for as we head into the second half of the season.

I’d also like to encourage anyone who has been absent from the contest to consider re-joining for the second half. I will keep a separate (non-cumulative) second half standings as well if there is sufficient interest.

As always, if you have any queries or suggestions, be sure to leave them in the comments along with your predictions.

Ok, now on to the business of the match against San Jose. Good luck everyone!

• Predictions will be ‘valid’ if posted HERE (or more accurately, the correct match thread) prior to the lineup being officially announced, usually about an hour before kickoff.
• You receive 1 point for every player you correctly guess to be in the Starting XI. You receive 4 bonus points for correctly predicting all 11 starters.
• You get 5 points for correctly guessing Win/Lose/Draw, this doubles to 10 if you also predict the right score-line along with the result.
• That means, if you correctly predict the Starting XI, Final Score, and Winner, you can earn 25 points!
• At the end of each quarter, the contestants lowest score of that period will be deducted from the cumulative standings.