Statistically, the 2010 D.C. United team that shuffled demurely through the MLS season was the worst attacking team in MLS history. They were shut out an astonishing 17 times, which shattered the previous record by two matches. Australian Danny Allsopp, who D.C. bought from Qatar, was the team’s leading scorer. After the season, the No. 9 immediately moved back to Australia.

Every now and then the wind shifts and an MLS team finds itself embedded in the thick of the tornado for an entire season, unable to find its way out and seek refuge. This is shaping up to be that kind of year for the hopeless Colorado Rapids.

The Rapids are 360 minutes into the 2015 season and have yet to score. If you include the end of the 2014 season, it’s been more than 600 minutes since any Rapids player correctly located the back of the net. The team has not won in 18 consecutive matches, and they’ll break that league record if they fail to win against FC Dallas on Friday night. The season is comically young, but we are now deep enough into the Rapids’ prolonged tailspin to wonder if Pablo Mastroeni’s team is ready to join the ranks of the worst teams to ever play in MLS.

The league’s tidal shifts in how many games it’s played in a season make direct comparisons more difficult, but we can break it out to show you the inauspicious company toward which the Rapids are groping. In 2010, D.C. United scored 21 goals over the course of a 30-game season. That’s the worst total in MLS history. In a 34-game season, which MLS currently employs, D.C. United also holds the record for the 22 they scored in 2013, which, given the benefit of four more games, is a far more impressively bad feat than 2010. Over a 32-game season, which MLS has used three times, RSL in 2005 and the Columbus Crew in 2006 hold the joint record for goal-scoring futility with 30.

All this to say that the Rapids’ current pace of zero goals is not good. It’s very bad, in fact. If you don’t score any goals in a season, you won’t win any games. This is science.

Probability will end the Rapids’ goal-less streak at some point, but the longer it drags the more pressure mounts. And there was already fan-applied pressure. The Rapids managed to whip off 17 shots in their most recent 2-0 loss to the New England Revolution over the weekend. Three of those hit the woodwork. Statistics don’t generally like protruding nails like those. Keep pouring it on and the goals will come. But why haven’t they already? What is it about this team that makes it so uniquely unable to score?

The most overarching point we need to make is that it’s an institutional, top-down problem. They don’t use the middle of the field. Marcelo Sarvas completed a blistering 90 percent of his passes against New England, and Vicente Sanchez made a veiled attempt at funneling his service through the middle. But the Rapids are beyond heavily reliant on channeling everything through the flanks. Colorado attempted an unfathomable 35 crosses against New England, and while it out-possessed New England in every salient category, it was hardly ever in possession of the ball in or anywhere near the critical Zone 14. Of Sarvas’ 16 completed forward passes (that is, those that weren’t either squared off or recycled backward) 15 were sprayed out wide to the flank to facilitate service along the game’s fringes.

Almost everything the Rapids do is hopelessly tilted toward one of the sidelines, and the majority of their crosses are last-ditch efforts in an attempt to save broken possession. There were endless examples of this against New England, but this long sequence is as good of an illustration as there was. Follow the dots.

We start here with Juan Ramirez on the right, who’s won possession slanted toward the right flank to begin with and begun to traipse down that side of the field.

Ramirez shuttles off possession to Sarvas, who takes one touch toward the middle before spraying wide left for Dillon Powers, who’s almost immediately tight to his defender at the edge of the area. Notice Sarvas’ other option: laying off to a steaming Lucas Pittinari, who has no midfielders between him and the soft tissue of the Revolution back line. At the very least, this is a prime opportunity for a one-two.

Powers cuts in on his right and attempts a cross toward a far post with no Rapids attackers on it. His wayward services bounces back out to Pittinari, which re-starts the attack. We go again. Here’s our beginning attack position for our second bite.

And here’s where we end up. Again. Defender Marc Burch using his left to shuttle in a cross so tight to the end line that it had nowhere to go but to be deflected out for a corner.

Another cross. Powers’ flat corner was headed off by the Revs, which then started another attack for the Rapids, which led to another failed cross, this one by Sarvas. That reset position again, and the Rapids’ long string of speculative chances finally ended when Burch sent a 50-yard ball up the left flank to nowhere. And on it went.

Over-reliance on crosses as a mode of opportunity is a fool’s errand. We know this already. They’re far better used as a side dish and not the main entree. When the Rapids did allow themselves chances up the middle, they were occasionally coherent and at the very least pressed New England’s defenders to make decisions with their feet. Watch how the Sounders carved up the Revolution in the opening weekend and then watch this and the Rapids’ lack of goals wasn’t rocket science.

This level of neurotic insistence on crossing in the run of play without a true target man is the height of madness. Torres is 5-foot-11.

The Rapids are not a pleasant team to watch because of both how they’re built and how they build. Drafting both Axel Sjoberg and Joseph Greenspan in 2015 was a signal marker for how this team plans to utilize its resources. Both are skyscrapers, and neither has particular skill with the ball at his feet. But Sjoberg managed to make more than 20 clearances in the Rapids’ opener, a sure sign that the insistence on partitioning the attack into both flanks has done plenty to open the middle to opponents’ attacks. It’s been by sheer force of will that the Rapids hadn’t conceded a goal until the weekend.

Part of the problem is that the Rapids have done a poor job of pouring a foundation since Oscar Pareja took the franchise’s optimism with him to Dallas. Forty-six percent of Mastroeni’s roster are defensive players, and more than half of his midfielders have defensive proclivities. His only true target forward capable of playing into this brutishly simple attacking style is 6-foot-2 Caleb Calvert, an 18-year old with an enormously high ceiling who’s now being ignored and stunted by his second MLS team.

Not every team has to (or even should) play a fluid style through the middle, but it’s clear the Rapids’ current approach isn’t working. If they don’t diversify and at least try and find more daylight through the middle, 2010 D.C. United might have some company by the end of the year.