Dave’s Football Blog

It’s not the first time a college marching band has played off an Internet meme. That does not make this any less awesome. It also gives me an excuse to post this photo of me playing with the N.C. A&T drum line.

They’re all Internet dorks like me now. This warms my heart.

If you’re unfamiliar with the meme, click here.

(Spotted on Every Day Should Be Saturday.)

And I blame these two:

Because let’s be honest. If David Villa and Fernando Torres were on their game in the 2009 Confederations Cup semifinals, how impressive would Bob Bradley’s 4-year run be, really?

Yes, there are positives to Bradley’s tenure thus far. He’s encouraged a number of U.S. national team players to build their skills in Europe. He won a Gold Cup in 2007 and was arguably 45 minutes away from beating Brazil in a cup final two years later. He managed to get some tough opposition for his squad to cut its teeth on in 2008. His tactical nous has been hit-or-miss, but when he hits it, boy, it flies out of the park. Just ask those two dudes in red up there.

When he misses, however, it’s a colossal bungle. Yes, the USA won Group C at the World Cup, but it wasn’t that strong a group, really, and it took a stoppage-time goal against Algeria to get us through. And what happened when we got there? Bradley put his faith in Ricardo Clark. It was the sort of decision that made you wonder if Bradley’s only real contribution to the U.S. national team was fertilizing the egg that grew into our best central midfielder. (Good job, Bob! Rex Ryan salutes you!)

Some would argue that this is the right decision for now, and that a guy like Juergen Klinsmann would be better for the job after the 2014 World Cup. Maybe that’s true. By bringing back Bradley for four more years, however, U.S. Soccer risks suffering the same fate in 2014 as it did in 2006 — allowing the atmosphere around the team to get stale, resulting in another early World Cup exit. U.S. Soccer is taking the easy road here, which is just what you would expect from someone like Sunil Gulati, who seems eager to sell us something while making only minimal effort to get us excited about it. Keeping Bradley is not exciting, and it means expectations for 2014 will be muted at best.

But hey, we got this goal and this goal, and we knocked Spain — champions of Europe and, eventually, champions of the world – out of a major international competition. So there’s that.

If Bradley is to take this team any further in 2014, he might need a Carlos Queiroz-type behind him — not the guy who made the Portuguese side so ineffectual, but the guy who sat behind Sir Alex Ferguson and helped Manchester United win multiple Premier League crowns and a Champions League trophy. Hell, Queiroz might be available to play that role for Bradley soon, and given that his Q-Report was the basis for U.S. Soccer’s Project 2010, he’d be a pretty good guy to have around.

Then again, maybe all Bradley needs is a stronger group of players from which to choose — something that should be the focus regardless of who this team’s manager is. We certainly have a better chance of making that happen in the next four years than we have of beating Spain again.

After three weeks of fantasy football, Premier League-style, it’s become quite apparent that I have some work to do.

Already, I find myself 41 points off the pace, thanks to a handful of questionable roster moves — starting the season with Carlos Tevez instead of Didier Drogba (a move I quickly rectified), dropping Andrei Arshavin after a poor performance at Liverpool, thinking Ryan Shawcross would once again be a fantasy bargain in defense, forgetting about Everton’s traditionally slow start to the season (grumble), and so on. It’s not nearly as exact a science, this fantasy stuff.

Thus, it seems likely that I’ll have to hand out a prize this year. Luckily, for me and for you, someone has stepped up to offer one.

The winner of this year’s Dave’s Football Blog Fantasy Premier League will receive a $100 gift certificate from SoccerPro.com, which offers a wide selection of soccer equipment and licensed apparel. SoccerPro.com is a supporter of Dave’s Football Blog, and we thank them for providing this gift certificate.

By the way, if I manage to make up this 41 point difference and win this league, as it was during the World Cup Fantasy League, this gift certificate is mine. If you want the prize, you must beat Off Constantly FC. So there.

In fact, we might have a second $100 gift certificate to SoccerPro.com to give away in a separate fantasy contest, which will be announced later — as soon as I figure out who’s running a UEFA Champions League fantasy league around here. ESPN seems to be shunning the Champions League on SoccerNet these days. (What? The Worldwide Leader playing down a league for which it doesn’t have the TV rights? Why, even Barry Melrose would scoff!)

If you already have a team and would like to join the Dave’s Football Blog league, click here to find out how.

I don’t pay much attention to the NFL pre-season, in part because it’s filled with games that don’t count, and I’m not that into watching practice squad (and UFL) fodder compete for jobs. These games aren’t anything to take seriously.

That said, Lions rookie Ndamukong Suh is clearly taking the mere presence of Jake Delhomme very seriously here. The more I watch this, the more I wonder if Suh had a wager on that Panthers-Cardinals playoff game a couple seasons ago — you know, the one where Jake threw four interceptions, somehow didn’t get benched, and then threw two more. If I were a broke college student, and someone cost me a hundred bucks, I might want to smack them down, too.

Then again, if I were a broke college student betting on football games, I might need someone to call Gambler’s Anonymous for me…

Here are some other things going on in the wide world of football:

• The NFL and CDC are teaming up to fight 6 decades of “You’re not hurt that bad!” thinking about concussions. Good luck with that, boys. (Playbook)
• Is there really any need to shorten the preseason, other than money? (Shutdown Corner)
• If you’re visiting South Africa, be sure to check out the grand white elephants. (Dirty Tackle)
• If you’re visiting New Zealand, saying the words “Rugby”, “World” and “Cup” together out loud might cost you. You’ve been warned. (Techdirt)
• An American rugby sevens player will take a crack at the UFL. It probably helps that he played football at LSU. (FanHouse)
• Like Boise State’s blue turf? Check out Eastern Washington’s red turf. (via EDSBS, who thinks that red turf is JUST SO METAL!!!)
• Wanna buy a share of Arsenal? Only 100 easy payments of £102.50. (Pitch Invasion)
• Harry Redknapp will not tolerate your insinuations. (EPL Talk)
• Your 2010 AFL Finals series Week 1 fixtures, which make me wish Time Warner Cable would stop being so stingy and give us our ESPN3. (AFL.com.au)

Also, for those of you participating in this site’s Fantasy Premier League competition, I’ll have a prize announcement later today.

(H/T to Will Brinson for the video)

Our pal Brian Phillips of The Run of Play described Manchester City today as “the footballing version of the devastating forest fire that leads to new growth.”

That’s perhaps just a bit nicer than what Sir Alex Ferguson and Jose Mourinho, among others, have been saying about Man City lately. It seems everyone is looking at Sheikh Mansour splashing his oil millions around like they’re going out of style — the club has spent more than £300 million on transfer fees alone since his arrival at Eastlands — and suggesting that the club has simply adopted its business strategy from South Park’s underpants gnomes. Sure, City can collect players, but how is it going to keep all those egos happy?

Of course, this completely ignores the one thing England has been complaining about for the last three or four World Cup cycles — fixture congestion. Our boys play too many games! They get tired out too quickly! We must do something!

Guess what, folks? ol’ Sheikh Mansour and Roberto Mancini are doing something. They are attacking the problem of fixture congestion with what might be the obvious solution — depth.

Take a look at the lineup City fielded against Liverpool. Now look at the lineup City fielded against FC Timisoara in its Europa League qualifier. Immediately, two things stand out:

1. Only four players started both games.
2. Neither lineup sucked.

[Read more →]

Now that the gridiron game has proven to be rougher on its players’ brains than anyone realized, designers are taking another look at the football helmet and wondering if that’s the problem. An aerospace designer named Michael Princip thinks he might have a solution: a “multi-component anti-shock helmet design” that absorbs the energy of collisions and sends that energy away from the head.

From Wired Playbook:

Princip has spent the last six months redesigning the football helmet so it can better dissipate energy from collisions. The result is the Bulwark, a design that still features internal padding, much like current helmets covered by a solid shell. But the true innovation lies on top of that shell: a shock-absorbing layer of pre-molded foam. “It’s like an industrial-grade bubble wrap,” according to Princip. That padding layer would then be covered by four separate sections that comprise the outer shell.

The openings between those sections would act like crumple zones, giving flex to the outer portion of the helmet while absorbing a hit, thereby lessening trauma to the head. The design would also lighten the helmet’s weight by using new materials to reduce the force of impact in helmet-to-helmet collisions.

Not that the force if hitting your head against anything can prevent an injury. Eli Manning reminded us of that last Monday. Still, letting the helmet absorb shocks rather than the brain seems like a vast improvement for players who aren’t so eager to follow the NFL’s current policy on brain bruises. The question now is whether this design (or something like it) gets adopted by the NFL or NCAA in the near future.

(H/T: Playbook.)