Every year, MLS has exciting playoff action, and every year, people complain. Then people complain about the complainers.

But the argument changes a little each year. Especially this year, with the first 10-team playoff in league history. The tournament has produced its share of excitement as always, and it allowed the big-money, big-market, big-name New York Red Bulls to overcome that pesky stretch of winning two out of 20 games. (Hey, they only lost five.)

I’m not completely joking here. One advantage of a playoff format is that it allows a team to sort things out over the course of a season and build toward something big at the end. The Red Bulls might not be the best example, but consider Real Salt Lake, an obviously excellent team that was battered by injuries and a busy schedule. Jason Kreis’s club will face the Galaxy on Sunday in one of those truly outstanding matchups that the playoffs can produce.

Here’s the problem — we have less than 72 hours to build up to that game.

You might not be thinking, “Hey, how does this affect USA TODAY?” But it does. I was able to get a story in Wednesday’s paper on the Galaxy-Red Bulls series and other games — just my third MLS story of the year, which indicates a few more problems. A story on the Salt Lake-Galaxy semifinal would be great, but it can’t be done for any print version of USA TODAY. The Galaxy-Red Bulls game ended at 1 a.m. ET, beyond all reasonable deadlines for the Friday paper. USA TODAY doesn’t publish again until Monday. (Some sports merit online-only coverage on weekends, but MLS isn’t there. Yet.)

Other media outlets have similar problems. Everyone has to scramble to get things ready for a huge game in just three days.

Then there are those other people who have just a couple of days to prepare. What are they called? Oh, right — players.

So to sum up — the biggest games of the season so far will feature two tired teams in a media dead zone.

Tweaking the schedule could help a little bit. But the basic problem is that a 10-team playoff forces another round of games to be squeezed into what is already a narrow window of decent weather in North America.

Everyone has a favorite fix-all for the playoffs. I posted mine at this time last year, and it was ignored as always. The basic idea: Play an Apertura and Clausura season, with a Cup tournament at the end of the Clausura (before the summer break). You could even give the Supporters Shield to an Apertura winner, MLS Cup to the Clausura/playoff winner and an MLS SuperCup to the winner of a big neutral-site game in August, when there’s less competition for attention.

Barring a major shakeup like that, though, the simplest thing to ask would be to scale it back to eight teams. Just not enough time to get those wild cards in the mix.