MLS Bizarro World

Down is up, up is down, dogs and cats are living together. MLS is awash in unexpected results one month in. New York is at the top of the table. DC United hasn't won a match. People seem to be taking Columbus seriously. What the hell is going on here?

I'm still not sold on the Red Bulls, but their number of week links may have been reduced to just two, and one should be remedied with the addition of Juan Pablo Angel. Going into the season, I thought their backline would be suspect, because the central pairing of Carlos Mendes and Jeff Parke struggled a lot last year, and New York has a long history of crappy outside backs. That said, I had forgotten about how good Todd Dunivant was before his injury, and didn't really know much of anything about Hunter Freeman. Parke had a fantastic rookie season before regressing a bit, and subsequently, he and Mendes are doing much better.

Some of that may be all the midfield support they have in a very conservative alignment. Claudio Reyna is sitting really deep, and that means long balls out of the back for Jozy Altidore, or lots of wing play, both of which have been working well enough to get the wins so far.

As for DC, I think some guys on that squad have been overachieving in the last couple of years, and now we're seeing what happens when they start to buy into this notion that they're the cream of the crop in MLS. I'm talking mostly about Bryan Namoff and Brian Carroll, who were never really as good as DC fans said they were. And Erpen was never all that good at all. There may be more to the current meltdown in the midfield possession game, but I haven't taken a good look at it yet. Maybe tonight, in glorious high-definition.

That leaves Columbus. While the four G's -- Gaven, Grabavoy, Gary and Ngwenya -- have looked very good at times, I still can't take them seriously, as they're still just one loss away from being .500. Early unbeated streaks based on a lot of draws are notoriously misleading, so we'll see how that plays out.

Returning home to the Fire, CJ Brown said something very interesting and very important to Luis Arroyave the other day. "Last year it took us longer to realize we need to keep the ball moving," Brown told Arroyave on Tuesday. "We only passed when we were in trouble. Now, we're moving the ball faster." This dovetails nicely into why I thought the Fire squandered their man advantage in Colorado, because they tricked themselves into thinking the extra man would let them take their time. But if the team is committed to faster ball movement, it will mean a world of difference in the long run.

I don't really have much to say about the West just yet, although L.A. seems poised to break out soon, and all of Colorado's unknowns coming into the season seem to have jelled.