FC Dallas Mock Expansion Draft Protection List

For as many years as I've been covering Major League Soccer, it seems most of the time around mid-to-late October I'm doing mock expansion draft lists for teams that are already eliminated from playoff contention. They're always a guess-work kind of post that typically generated a ton of discussion.

But seeing as how we're still a year away from the next expansion draft, the gang here at BigDSoccer thought it would be fun to put together our mock protection lists for this year. We know changes are going to happen this winter in Frisco. And keeping a core group of players is going to be key moving forward.

So today, we give you our 11 protected players for a hypothetical expansion draft.

Just as in previous years, Homegrown players and Generation adidas are exempt.

The international player rules of this is tricky. Per the previous expansion draft rules, we may make available a number of international players equal to their total number of international players minus three, provided that if a club has three or fewer international players it may make available not more than one. Dallas does have eight international players on the roster at the moment, so we can not expose more than five.

Our Protected Lists:

We all picked the same seven players to start out with, something I expected from this. Jackson and Erick were picked by four of five writers. Loyd, Watson and Nunez were saved by three of the writers.

I know for me, even though I see Loyd as a player that will likely not be back in 2014, I wouldn't want to just give him up this easily. I have the same feeling for Jacobson as well.

Steve made an excellent point in his list, he didn't protect Stephen Keel or Peter Luccin due to their age. Not many expansion teams are going to gamble on players in their 30s.

So in a hypothetical world, who would you protect?