There are a mere six regular season games left in the Sporting Kansas City season. Six games that will decide where we finish in the playoffs (if like me you believe we are close to locking this) or six games to decide if we make the cut. That said we do have competition and plenty of it. The Eastern Division is a paragon of mediocrity, a shining light of average and no fewer that six teams have a genuine shot at the playoffs and even the horrible Chicago and probably below have a mathematical chance of making it.

Tonight the Columbus Crew and Houston managed a draw.  A great result for us in what I deem to now be the race for first spot.  It was the first of 34 games that will tell the story of the final few weeks of our season.  If we win out, or do well none of it means a thing … but are we really going to? A win on the road this weekend in Utah will be massive but can’t be demanded the way we can demand to win against Eastern Conference competition at home. We also finish the season at DC United who are my own personal outside dark horse and boogie men. They have a quality experienced squad and they look like they are just starting to click.

Either way here are the 33 fixtures that count. The final one is a bullshit friendly vs Chivas Not USA’s 8th string.  The table below is accurate after the games on 9/14/2011 — it contains a couple of extra columns.  Available Points is basically how many points a given team has to play for, Max points is the total achievable.  As you can see DC United are in a position to wind up near the top ‘simply’ by winning the games they have in hand.

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.