There is something that happens to an organization that loses its succession plan to the buffeting winds of change. Posterity is the only real judge.

The Mongol Empire grew outward almost unfettered for nearly 50 years, from the time Genghis rode over Khwarezm and China to Mongke’s conquests of the Middle East and South Asia. But the undercurrent of power is swift, and without an obvious successor Mongke’s younger brothers, Ariq Boke and an ingenue named Kublai, waged a civil war for four years. Called the Toluid Civil War, the melee permanently fractured the Mongolian empire, and while it would have years of success to come, it never again reached the height of its power, divided as it was.

There is something to this in the current state of affairs in Sandy. Jeff Cassar was hired on as an imperial continuation in 2014 with the exit of his spiritual soccer kin, Jason Kreis, and more or less asked to continue carrying the same torch into darkened corridors in perhaps subtly different ways. Kreis, ever the taskmaster, would never fully jive with the more people-pleasing Cassar, but the men were wedded at the medulla on issues of franchise: building through the academy, scouting South America for smart if not pricey buys, staying within your means.

Cassar, though, was quite unlike Kreis in one way, and that was in tactical consistency. Cassar never found his sweet spot in any real way, and if I put it to MLS fans at large to describe RSL under Cassar as a definable body I dare say they’d struggle. His teams… valued width? Yes, but not always. They pinged it along the ground? They tried but often abandoned it. Then surely they were Route 1? When they had to be, but this was clearly not an ethos. So you had a sort of tactical mutt, content to dip a quill into a million different inkwells and never touch the feather to the page with any strength.

But one thing that most definitely did not bring Cassar down, and perhaps the reason RSL was so unwilling to jettison him after 2016, was his adherence to the RSL Way.

There was no small amount of conjecture about RSL’s decision to ultimately bring Cassar back for 2017 on a tenuous one-year deal. That Cassar was fired just three games into 2017 indicated the front office had its finger on the trigger for months and was simply looking for an excuse to pull the ripcord. So why not scope out the knee and just start fresh with the new season. And I will tell you, it’s because of Cassar’s firm connection to the heaving heart of what RSL wants you to think it is, whether it embodies those values at all times or merely some of them. Ending dynasties is difficult. Ending them when the man on the throne is well-liked and connected by lineage to Genghis himself? I did not agree with RSL’s decision to kick the decision on Cassar’s future down the road after 2016, but I understood it. There was yearning in it.

And now, for the first time, the lineage is broken. In the history of RSL, when some artist decides to draw a timeline of RSL’s coaching history, there will be a giant break after Kreis/Cassar and an entirely new line in a new color beginning with one name.

Mike Petke.

Whatever ancillary reasons exist, Cassar was hired precisely because he was a stable continuation of the dynasty that brought about the greatest period of success in RSL history, roughly from 2009-2013. He’d been there for the establishment of the Casa Grande academy in Arizona, had seen the Kyle Beckerman trade up close, worked with Yura Movsisyan in his first stint and then his second. He knew. And from management, his succession indicated a real continuation of the franchise since its turnaround in 2007. For the better part of a decade, RSL has been ruled by the same royal house.

That changed this year. Petke is so far outside the edicts that established the RSL Way that I wonder if RSL is undergoing a period of disputed succession or if it truly knows the course it’s plotting. Petke is a disciplinarian like Kreis, a tactical chameleon like Cassar and an age pragmatist like, say, Peter Vermes. Petke has nothing against promoting and playing young kids (Matt Miazga was ultimately signed underneath his gaze in New York), but it’s not part of his bedrock ethos the way it is for men like Oscar Pareja. He will start who he starts, and if that means a 33-year-old over a 21-year-old as a matter of course, it will be done. There is no artifice of youthful small ball here. Petke’s ideals are hard-boiled and sober at their core, and RSL has always been guided by a sort of Platonic way of seeing things. Of course we will promote Justen Glad, because he is ready here in a way he might not be elsewhere. This is not a natural conclusion for Petke. Or at least it wasn’t in New York.

Petke knows all this, of course. This is from RSL’s VP of soccer administration Rob Zarkos shortly after Petke was promoted from Real Monarchs.

“We need Mike to play a young guy and give him a chance. We’re deep with youth talent and with young guys you have to be strategic about when you play [them]. I think Mike has that in spades.”

I think he has the capacity to have it. Whether he has it in spades? A point of serious conjecture, I think.

And this is the true question for RSL, not just this year but in years to come. Will its insistence on building the way it has consume Petke, who’s never done anything but succeed as an MLS head coach, and shape him into a new sort of manager? Or will Petke’s matter-of-fact utilitarianism mark an entirely new course for RSL? Of course it will always value its academy to some degree, but with its move away from the sheltering cocoon of Arizona, where it’s stayed at the Casa Grande complex since the academy’s foundation in 2010, and back to Utah, change is here. As certain MLS academies attest, mere talent in the pipeline is chaff if ignored by the first team.

Petke may not plot that course. Methodologically, he may align himself with RSL’s ethos and simply pull it back into a sort of Kreis-like alignment. But that’s just the point, isn’t it? Petke represents the civil war. He is the question mark itself. And we’re now at a perilous point in RSL’s history where it’ll take two disparate ends meeting to make a new thing successful.

Whether that’s the RSL we’ve always known or a new creation, we’re about to find out.