Soccer: Mexico's Liga MX Regular Season Over, Playoffs to Come

Mexico's premier professional soccer league, the Bancomer Liga MX, has just completed its Clausura part of the 2014-15 split season, and eight teams out of the league's eighteen have qualified for the Clausura playoffs, which they call the Liguilla.  The first round begins with games on May 13th and 14th.  The league's two best teams (which met in the opening Apertura Liguilla championship round last December) are the UANL Tigres (meaning "tigers"), based in Monterrey, and Club America, based in Mexico City.  America won the Apertura playoffs, meaning that they are automatically in the final 2014-15 championship round against whichever team wins the upcoming Clausura Liguilla.  Should they win that one, too, they are automatic champions (no, I was mistaken...the Apertura and Clausura champions won't face each other to determine an overall champion).  But I'm pulling for the Tigres and Atlas (from Guadalajara) as my favorites in these springtime playoffs...

Each year, the poorest perfoming team, based on a comparative three-year measure of their records, gets relegated (demoted) to the next lower league (called "Ascenso") while the Ascenso champion gets promoted to Liga MX the next year.  This year the big loser was the Universidad de Guadalajara Leones Negros (meaning "black lions") who had only been promoted into the premier league the previous year.  I felt that they got a bum deal out of this, for they were quite competitive...and the league's worst team this year, Morelia, was far behind UDG in the standings and only avoided relegation because they had a good season back in 2012-13.  But those are the rules, and I can only wish the Leones Negros a good season next year in the Ascenso league...

I'm not a big fan of having playoffs determine championships when the regular season has already demonstrated which team is the best.  In European soccer, the regular season champion IS the final champion, but for some reason in North America, no matter which sport it is, there seems to be a kind of compulsion to hold intricate, drawn-out playoffs that often elevate lesser teams to championship status, just because they get "hot" at the propitious moment.  If Liga MX had done their league's championship the way that England's Premier League, Germany's Bundesliga, or Spain's La Liga does it, the UANL Tigres would be league champion tonight since they have the best aggregate regular season record if you combine the Apertura and Clausura split seasons.  But I suppose, with the Liguilla playoffs ahead, I'll still have some exciting Mexican soccer to look forward to watching...