The game. By the time Saturday morning got rolling, they were simply calling it the game. Toronto FC-Seattle Sounders. The two American kids come home to the place their careers started, headlining a game the league wanted so badly for so long. With respect to last weekend, this was the real MLS opener.

In the end, TFC’s 2-1 result was more than deserved. Jermain Defoe dazzled with visions of a 200+ goal season (yes). Michael Bradley was a generalissimo, perhaps doing too much, but an expected and not wholly unwelcome overcompensation from a player playing his first game back home. Clint Dempsey overturned a miserable (ball-slapping) first half to fire home his second Sounders goal stretched over a much, much brighter final 45. Osvaldo Alonso was mostly solid. Chad Barrett… existed.

These were entirely valid story lines. Defoe. Bloody Big Deal. Dempsey. But the real story, as it’s often been, was the overwhelmed man stalking the sideline wrapped in his customary scarf. The real storyline was Sigi Schmid.

The #SchmidOut drum has been pounded by so many people, so loudly and at so many different junctions over the past few years that its harangues tend to be washed out by the hum of daily life. That’s fair. You hear something enough and you tend to tune out its frequency. We’ve certainly heard enough half-baked ‘Fire Schmid’ campaigns concocted over the years, some of which are as ridiculous as any #CoachXOut campaign. And as always, it’s not always as simple as all that. Sometimes the jockey simply doesn’t have the horse under him to finish the race without kicking a shoe and snapping an ankle in a divot. This, in boiled-down terms, has been the Sounders’ MLS playoff experience.

But Saturday served as another gentle whisper that perhaps (just perhaps!) Schmid isn’t the man. This totem has taken multiple forms during his tenure in MLS. On Saturday, it was Marco Pappa and his surrounds. And boy, was Pappa terrible.

Though not flattering, Pappa’s metrics were not so harsh on his defensive capabilities or his out-and-out attacking duties. His biggest issue in the latter category was that he hardly took anyone on. Yet in possession, Pappa was an unfettered train wreck. All 12 of his crosses misconnected, and of his 25 completed passes (of his 33 taken), 15 were squared off or dumped backward. This was not entirely his own fault. He was shoehorned into a bizarre role.

At his best on the right with Chicago, Pappa was a left-footed cruise missile careening off the right side, taking on defenders and using his preternatural ability to flip on his prodigious jets to skitter inside the box and create chances. As with any inverted winger – Arjen Robben being the most obvious right-sided example – you’re asking him to pull inside to rip apart the natural order of the back line. Holes appear as the defenders begin to ever so slightly stack on each other. This is why his pairing with DeAndre Yedlin seemed so natural on paper. Overlapping fullbacks love inverted wingers. The holes are big enough to drive through.

This is not what happened with Marco Pappa. Blame Pappa, but blame the setup, too.

This is Pappa’s heat map.

This is Clint Dempsey’s heat map.

The first thing you’ll notice, after you see how little time Pappa spent in any dangerous positions, is overlapping spheres of influence. This is unquestionably Dempsey’s ‘blue period’ in which he struggles to find coherent meaning during games, and at his worst he’s unmoored to any real positional ethos. He’s simply swinging wildly around the field looking for meaning anywhere he can find it. You’ll notice that he tended to congregate on Pappa’s side. Where Pappa should’ve been pinching in.

In lieu of this, Pappa too often was bizarrely kept in the rearguard linking play (?!) or stuck out wide, marooned from the action and utterly ineffective. When he was not out wide, he was attempting (poorly) to link play where Dempsey was not. This is a symptom of Pappa’s lack of understanding for Dempsey’s game, that he tends to sample a bit from every midfielder’s position in order to find the flow. It’s nonsensical to most outward appearance, but when your teammates click into it the plan works wonderfully. Misunderstanding that impetus as ‘he’s replacing my role,’ Pappa did anything but act as an inverted winger. He either had to play his crosses wrong-footed or hit them inside-out. This helps to understand why he didn’t complete a single cross. He shouldn’t have been taking most of them in the first place.

The beautiful thing about the beautiful game is many of these issues are nebulous. Should Sigi have known Dempsey and Pappa would struggle to understand one another off the bat? Probably. Whether or not that should have stopped him from pairing them is beside the point. Who knows if Sigi even wanted Pappa in the first place. The disappointment here is that Pappa and Dempsey appeared to be operating from different playbooks. Pappa was not good in the opener. He was more or less miserable against Toronto. His horrid back pass led directly to Defoe’s second. His thought process looks as though it’s from Mars.

Where Sigi goes from here will define his future in Seattle. He has a central attacking midfielder whose discipline has long been taken behind the woodshed and shot to death, an inverted right midfielder playing like a right-footed player, an overloaded Ossie Alonso dealing with a right back pushed all the way to Tukwila and a center back partnership that looks anything but comfortable.

It’s March. We don’t make grand pronouncements in March. But it seems that once again Sigi Schmid is on blast.

Dillon Powers made us all sad on Saturday

Dillon Powers, the reigning league rookie of the year, collided with Seattle’s Zach Scott early last October and developed concussion symptoms. Troubling, of course. After a long offseason, Powers appeared on track to at least snag a couple minutes in the team’s season opener at New York. And for a time, he looked very good.

And then he took an elbow to the head and came off, bloodied, in the 64th minute. And we all kind of cringed.

Powers told me this week he had headaches for 3+ months after concussion in Oct. Bloodied head in 1st game back not good news. — Chris Bianchi (@Rapids_News) March 15, 2014

Why does this matter? Mostly because Powers is a blast to watch. He’s a prototypical No. 8 and capable of so many things. He’s a soccer purist’s player. Nothing flashy, but he can move around spaces like a nimble dancer, and he has a head for the game that seems to override some physical limitations.

This small moment midway through the first half is such a perfect illustration as to why Powers is so good. And why losing him for any period of time would be a tough blow to a promising young career.

This is Powers’ initial touch on this build-up, and he uses holding midfielder Nick LaBrocca as a backstop as he’s pressed by defenders on both sides. As soon as Powers lays it back to LaBrocca, he’s moving laterally to his right, toward the middle of the field where the Red Bulls’ have less of a presence.

LaBrocca pushes it back to Powers as he checks in, and Powers immediately uses LaBrocca again and moves into space the two created on their own in just a few passes. On this play they realize they can turn Tim Cahill. And that results in fresh pastures.

Following Powers’ natural trajectory from the second illustration, LaBrocca has surmised Powers’ plan here and hits him again on a fourth simple pass in nearly as many seconds. Look at all this space. Powers can now kick on and press the Red Bulls’ back line, which, as you can see, is utterly out of sorts and unready for Powers’ push.

This is our final product. Powers has pulled three men into a stacked position directly to his front, and he hits a streaking Dillon Serna off the right flank. This led to a direct scoring chance, with Serna stinging his shot goalward and forcing a keeper parry.

This sequence is so, so easily overlooked, but therein lies Powers’ beauty. It’s all in the details. And MLS needs them.

What is MLS, sometimes?

Vancouver. Chivas USA. A Chivas USA red card. A Whitecaps side coming off an unbelievable opening day 4-1 beating over the Red Bulls. A Chivas USA side that was very Chivas USAy. And then this at halftime.

Life is strange sometimes, you know?

You watched this game, and it was something like Muhammed Ali fighting a trash can and then becoming interred in the trash can and failing to find a way out of the trash can. You watched Oswaldo Minda and Tommy McNamara as the strangest and unlikeliest of central midfield pairings for Chivas, and it worked somehow. McNamara awkwardly barreling upfield and Minda just punching everything in sight.

The game flipped when the ‘Caps brought on Kekuta Manneh in the 61st, moving Sebastian Fernandez to the right, pushing up Miller closer to Mattocks and keeping Morales as the centralized playmaker. With that kind of talent arrayed across the front, it was a wonder it only stopped at one. But thus is MLS.

What this game also helped to expose is how much Seattle might come to miss Mauro Rosales. He put in a manful shift on the right for Chivas USA, and there’s an argument to be made that he was the overall man of the match. Completed 45 of his 53 passes, rarely gave away possession and his inert body was ostensibly responsible for the Goats’ lone goal. You take it any way you get it.

The San Jose Earthquakes are going to derp their way into the playoffs again

Ugh. This again. Wake me up when Tommy Thompson plays.