US Soccer Combined League 2013

Just suppose that many years ago, the US Soccer Federation required all professional teams to play in the same league system. Just suppose that they decided that it would be best to always have two equal leagues, east and west, before dividing teams vertically into Division 1, Division 2, etc. Just suppose that when they had enough teams, they split into Division 1 and 2 and promoted the best teams from Division 2 each year and relegated the worst teams from Division 1 each year.

And here's the big leap. Just suppose that we didn't have any more teams playing than what we actually had and have.

So in 2013, the USSF had 39 professional teams. This would be split into 20 in the East Division and 19 in the West Division (fewer teams because of greater travel distances). Enough teams had been announced to start in 2014 that the USSF would know they need to divide vertically into Divisions 1 and 2 to keep the league sizes manageable and still have every team play each other twice, home and away. So the USSF declared that the top eleven teams from each division, East and West, would stay in Division 1, while the bottom teams would be relegated to Division 2 to join the new teams in the new leagues.

Here is a map of the teams and a chart of the final standings.

Since the wonderful home-and-away round robin didn't actually happen, I've substituted that with ranking the teams by points-per-game, including all league and cup games actually played in 2013.

Note that Colorado had the same points-per-game as Minnesota and Vancouver. Colorado won the tiebreaker on head-to-head games.