The 2015 season snapped shut on the Colorado Rapids like a rabid dog closing his jaws around a ragged piece of dumpster meat.

MLS titled its final regular season match day ‘Decision Day,’ aligning every Eastern Conference and Western Conference game to go off at the same time. In practice, this created a decidedly intriguing finale as teams flipped into and out of playoff seeds throughout the course of the day.

One team that had nothing to decide was Colorado. The Rapids were picking crumbs off the floor of the Western Conference basement before the day began, and a limp 4-1 loss to eventual champion Portland on Oct. 26 brought their season to a merciful conclusion. The poor dog had been run over.

That was more or less good news for the Rapids, who were eager to turn around a miserable season in which the team played nigh unwatchable soccer. The central midfield was hardly a going concern; the Rapids hardly even used it. Surely an offseason spent licking wounds, replacing out-of-touch players and administrators and scouring the global transfer market would bring fresh sun to mountainside.

Three months later, the guy who concocted the “when it rains, it pours” idiom just looked at the Colorado Rapids offseason and openly wept.

The Rapids had a number of tasks this offseason, and they have fulfilled few, if any, of them. I won’t say firing coach Pablo Mastroeni was among them, because you can come to your own conclusions as to whether he is over his head or not. But at the very least, the Rapids have not taken conclusive steps to remedy ills that made them the worst team in the West and the presumptive heir to Chivas USA’s throne as the worst watch in MLS.

The Rapids were actually quite competent defensively in 2015. In fact, their 43 goals allowed would’ve tied them for the best defense in the watered down East, and it was better than two playoff teams in the West. But they could. not. score. Since 2011, Chivas USA (twice) and D.C. United’s putrid 2013 team were the only sides to score fewer than Colorado’s 33 in 2015, which was perhaps no surprise when the attack was built around Kevin What Position Am I Doyle.

A striker? No Kevin. You are not a striker. You will play the 10 role and get tired a lot and you will enjoy yourself or else we will leave you outside Breckenridge and you will have to walk home.

The easy thing, though, from the Rapids’ perspective this offseason was that literally any good attacking player worked. Colorado was so bereft of game-breaking, upper echelon forward players in 2015 that they could literally use anyone of quality at any position and find room for them. Striker? Dom Badji isn’t stealing time from a top class international. Central attacking mid? That’s certainly not Dillon Powers, Marcelo Sarvas or Sam Cronin. Even Marco Pappa can flip flanks for the right player. He certainly did in Seattle.

The Rapids were conspicuously quiet for the first few months of the offseason. They cut ties with a few pieces of driftwood, declining options on eight players, trading a draft pick to Philly to secure Zac MacMath (God bless this dude), picking up Micheal Azira in the Waiver Draft (still a mechanism, apparently!), and trading Seattle allocation money in exchange for Pappa.

These were mostly housekeeping items, shuffling the deck of cards so they didn’t fly out of the hand. And then January hit and the body blows came fast.

The rock began rolling downhill with speed around the MLS SuperDraft. The Rapids’ strategy through the first two rounds was to offload positioning for money, supposedly because they were interested in stacking up a deal for Ale Bedoya, who was in some level of negotiation with MLS. The Rapids had the No. 2 overall pick in the draft and traded it away to Philadelphia for general allocation money and a player to be named later. Colorado then traded No. 12 and No. 22 to Chicago for No. 15 and No. 33 and Chicago’s No. 1 allocation ranking.

Allocation money and allocation ranking. It is not hard to see the heading.

The Bedoya rumors were quickly squashed, but they were replaced by those involving Alan Pulido, an up-and-coming 24-year-old Mexican striker with an incredible return of four goals in six full national team matches. He’s at Olympiacos in Greece, and on the day of the draft we learned the Rapids were reportedly “closing in” on him. We’ll get there in a minute.

Four days after the Rapids’ draft – it was not good and filled no real need, if you wanted to know – they dealt Clint Irwin. This triggered one of the great MLS blog rants of our time, driving a fan to croon that he doesn’t even mind mediocrity compared to this. There is something profoundly sad in that bubble of thought, but I have neither the time, mental fortitude or inclination to delve into its murky depths. Suffice it to say: bad things.

This generated a new wave of speculation fueled by Jeff Carlisle’s report that the Rapids were sniffing around Tim Howard. The Irwin trade made no sense anyway – allocation money and two draft picks the club doesn’t know what to do with? – and while a 36-year-old Howard on the downslope of his career would fit into that timeline, the entire scenario felt patently ridiculous. The Rapids didn’t need defensive help. Why were they attempting to reinforce the strongest part of the hull while the mast burns to cinder? Plus, Howard would most likely command a fantastical salary compared to his age, whereas Irwin was among the league’s most criminally underrated keepers, cap friendly and a fan favorite.

Turns out Everton hadn’t gotten word. This not only served to fan flames among the fan base – “we traded Irwin for…” – but it most likely irked MacMath, who was named the No. 1 keeper when Irwin departed and has to watch this soap opera unfold with the rest of us.

And we are not done.

On Tuesday (that is today), the Rapids dealt their beleaguered fans withering hooks from two opposite directions. The first involved second-year defender Joseph Greenspan, who got a couple minutes last year as a right back (HE IS 6-FOOT-6, AMERICA). The Greenspan draft pick was highly criticized in this space last year, because Greenspan is in the Navy. Colorado is not near the ocean. The Navy requires service. Am I taking crazy pills.

Well, judgment day finally showed up. Greenspan is off to the ocean, and it is unclear when he’ll even return to the team.

Greenspan was a fine center back in college, and it’s possible he could’ve been a fine center back in MLS. But concerns about how his service would interfere with his ability to actually play soccer warded off a number of MLS teams. The Rapids still took him with their second pick at 26 overall, but only after they’d already taken another defender who happened to be 6-foot-7 in the first round. What is happening. Why am I de-materializing. Is this the Matrix. Am I inside the Matrix right now. Why am I tasting numbers.



Well, Greenspan is gone now, just like literally everyone on planet Earth knew he would be.

But we still haven’t touched all this untold allocation money and this No. 1 allocation ranking the Rapids spent the offseason hoarding like a chipmunk on Speed in autumn. Remember Pulido? The deal that seemed like the direction the Rapids really wanted to go?

Yeah, that doesn’t appear to be happening either.

According to this: Rapids coach flew to Greece, fee agreed upon for Pulido (4m euros), Pulido refused move to MLS. //t.co/5oxYiFPKoJ — Eric Gomez (@EricGomez86) January 26, 2016

That report came from Monterrey, Mexico outfit RG690. The translation of their original tweet reporting the news is just some kind of Emily Dickinson work. So much despair in here.

If that report is true – and we don’t know that it is – Mastroeni flew all the way to Greece to be rejected by Pulido, essentially to his face. The sads. All of the sads.

To recap, the Rapids have spent much of the offseason collecting the resources to acquire a “name” and either whiffed or never got particularly close (so far) to three Designated Player targets, lost a player they will have to replace that even residents of Mars knew they’d lose, dealt away perhaps the biggest fan favorite on the team, added no substantive attacking help (unless you count Zach Pfeffer), and caused their fans to tailspin into a feverish round of hand-wringing over whether their fandom is worth the cost.

The good and bad news is that there are 38 days left until the Rapids open the 2016 season, which will assuredly be Mastroeni’s last in Colorado if the team isn’t in a playoff position and playing reasonably better soccer by the summer. The good news is that the Rapids have more than a month to fill out a roster that currently only has 19 players listed on it after Greenspan. They have allocation money (we don’t know how much, but it’s probably safe to say not many teams have more), are at the top of the list and can afford to take on just about anyone, positionally. If you are good, the Rapids can use you.

The bad news is that there are 38 days until the regular season, and the Rapids, on paper, actually look worse than they did in 2015, which is a sight to behold. Doyle is not a DP, Sarvas is too old to hold up the center of the midfield anymore, and Pappa, who is probably the team’s best attacking player (said it!), is basically begging to be stranded on a chain of lonely islands in the South Pacific in this setup.

The Rapids are hurting. Here’s hoping they can convince someone to charge in and pull the ship upright, because it is still sinking.