Perhaps the most amazing thing is that he broke this record in 15 games. The Saints still have one game left, at home against the Carolina Panthers on New Year’s Day. While he already has the NFL record, Brees still has two marks to surpass.

• Brees needs 133 more passing yards to top Jim Kelly’s single-season USFL record of 5,219 yards, which he set with the Houston Gamblers in 1984 — the same year Marino set his NFL record. (To be fair, the USFL played an 18-game season.)
• Brees needs 193 yards to become the first quarterback in pro football history to pass for three miles in a single season. THREE MILES!

Has any quarterback at any level of American football thrown for more than 3 miles in a single season? The answer is four, all in NCAA Division I Bowl Series football. B.J. Symons set the record of 5,833 passing yards in a season in 2003 at Texas Tech. Another Texas Tech QB, Graham Harrell, is second with 5,705 yards in 2007. Houston QB Case Keenum threw for 5,671 yards in 2009, and Hawaii QB Colt Brennan threw for 5,549 yards in 2006.

Those college records, however, don’t translate into pro success, largely because those teams ran the run-and-shoot offense, which fell out of favor in the NFL decades ago. Harrell, who also holds the Texas high school football single-season passing record — 4,825 yards in 2003 — is the 3rd-string quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, while Symons and Brennan are currently out of football. Keenum, who is the NCAA’s all-time leader in total passing yards, touchdowns, and completions, is finishing his senior season at Houston.

UPDATE: Just to make sure all our bases are covered here, Doug Flutie holds the Canadian Football League record for most passing yards in a single season with 6,619, set with the B.C. Lions in 1991. Also, Mark Grieb set the Arena Football League record this year with 5,310 passing yards for the San Jose SaberCats.

Fans, of course, want the trophies. Last April, I posed this question to a few Manchester City supporters: if you had to choose one, would you prefer Man City finished in the top four of the Premier League or won the FA Cup? Without hesitation, they chose winning the FA Cup. Seeing their club lift a trophy was the most important thing.

That answer seems somewhat prescient today, one day after both Manchester City and Manchester United were knocked out of the UEFA Champions League and sent down to the second-tier Europa League. City’s fate was out of its hands after its loss at Napoli, while United’s shocking collapse in Switzerland has pundits suggesting there’s trouble in paradise. (And if you saw United’s midfield get overrun by the champions of Switzerland – something that had only been witnessed before in Michel Platini’s wet dreams — you’d be inclined to agree.)

So while Chelsea and Arsenal supporters sit back and savor the schadenfreude, the question sits out there like Dimitar Berbatov on the bench — will either of these giants actually make an effort to win this thing?

After all, Champions League elimination doesn’t change the fact that Man City and Man United are now #1 and #2 on the Premier League table, and that’s clearly the most prestigious trophy on offer to them now. Some might even argue the FA Cup is a more worthwhile competition to win than the Europa League.

Why does UEFA’s 2nd-level competition inspire such disdain? It might have something to do with UEFA allocating five times more money to the Champions League than the Europa League. Last season, Porto earned only £6.68 million for winning the Europa League, plus another million quid for the right to lose to Champions League winner Barcelona in the UEFA Super Cup. Compare that to the £45.34 million Man United made for reaching the Champions League final last season — slightly more than what winners Barcelona made (£43.5), thanks to the television money. Simply put, the Europa League is a very big effort for a very small payout.

This might explain why bigger English clubs have a long history of spurning this competition. Martin O’Neill ran out the Aston Villa reserves in the Europa League three years ago so he could stay focused on finishing fourth in the Premier League. (Ultimately, that effort failed.) Harry Redknapp can’t wait for Tottenham Hotspur to get bounced out of the group stage this season, so that he can focus on staying in the top four of the Premier League. Only a smaller club like Fulham, who reached the Europa League final in 2010, would find value in pursuing that trophy. (Lest we forget, Fulham’s inability to contain current Man City forward Sergio Aguero was one of the main reasons they lost that final to Atletico Madrid.)

A trophy is a trophy, though, and this is one that either Manchester side could win with a little effort. Imagine how much fun it might have been if either Sir Alex Ferguson or Roberto Mancini did their best Jim Fassel impersonation in front of the press and declared, “We’re going to win the Europa League.” Mancini came closest with his “two trophies” declaration, but that could be any two, and City is much closer to winning the Carling Cup first. If they can survive a two-legged tie against Liverpool, they seem likely to annihilate the Championship side they’ll face at Wembley — even if one of them did win at Old Trafford to reach the semis. Win a Carling Cup, and City will gladly sacrifice the 2nd-tier European trophy to win the top flight in England.

And what of United, a club that hasn’t had a trophy-less season in seven years? Do they decide to take the Europa League seriously, or do they bail from that competition to focus on knocking City off the top spot? Losses to Crystal Palace and Basel in a two-week span — not to mention the loss of their best center back for the season – would suggest they might not be capable of either with their current squad. We could see Sir Alex make some big moves in January.

Either way, this trophy is very much up for grabs, and there are plenty of good clubs here — including Valencia, Schalke 04, and last year’s winners Porto — who would be more than happy to lift it next May. Man City and Man United would be good bets to win the Europa League if they tried, but if we’ve learned anything about this competition, it’s that this isn’t about who wants it more, but who even wants it at all.

David Beckham, the most famous footballer on the planet — which he was, at least, in 2007 when he signed that $32.5 million deal with the Los Angeles Galaxy — lifting the biggest prize in American soccer.

Never mind that it took the full length of that five-year deal. Never mind that Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo might have higher international Q scores now. Never mind that books were written about how Beckham and Landon Donovan didn’t get along at all. Never mind that it took all three of the Galaxy’s designated players — Beckham, Donovan and Robbie Keane, who were paid a combined $12.2 million this season and have scored a combined 187 goals in the Premier League, and isn’t that a number Galaxy superfan Snoop Dogg will appreciate — to work together to get the lone goal scored in the MLS Cup Final. Never mind that Adam Cristman’s complete lack of apparent skill on the pitch last night nearly torpedoed the entire thing.

And certainly never mind that this photo is probably more entertaining:

None of that matters now. MLS got the photo it wanted. It will be plastered on web sites around the world, sending a message to players and fans everywhere — soccer matters in America. Come explore what we’ve got.

And what will people find when they explore MLS? They’ll find stadiums in many cities — most notably Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles and Philadelphia – that have great match day atmosphere. They’ll find more young up-and-coming stars than they will aging veterans playing out their careers. They’ll find a knowledgable fan base that’s growing every season. They’ll find that the level of play here, a few players excepted, isn’t all that bad. Sure, Chelsea v. Liverpool was far more watchable and displayed far more talent on the pitch yesterday than L.A. Galaxy v. Houston Dynamo, but who’s to say that this Galaxy squad couldn’t pick off its share of clubs at the bottom of the Premier League table? Could Wigan defend as well as the Dynamo did against L.A.? Could Blackburn? Could Wolves?

That’s exactly the conversation MLS wants us to have as it prepares to start its new television deal with NBC Sports next season. Beckham might be on his way to Paris, but the league got everything out of him that they could, including that picture of him lifting the league’s big prize. Perhaps a few more kids will dream of lifting that trophy one day. The bigger picture, though, is that MLS isn’t going anywhere. It’s on the sporting map in America, and it’s only going to get bigger. That might be a lot more than we can say for the NBA right about now.

(For more on the MLS Cup Final, click here and here.)

Yesterday, our pals at Dirty Tackle decided to highlight a Copa Sudamericana match in which a dog invaded the pitch and held up play for 3 minutes. The suggestion that this dog might have been “the most successful pitch invader ever” falls flat, however, when you consider this rather famous moment from the International Rules series in which an Irish corgi not only got loose on the pitch, but joined in the game. At one point, he even got the ball away from an Australian player — something the Irish were struggling mightily with at the time.

Speaking of International Rules, the 2011 series kicks off this weekend in Melbourne. Sadly, it won’t air anywhere in the U.S. — show of hands: who misses Setanta Sports right about now? — but keep an eye on this guy’s YouTube channel, which still has last year’s International Rules series matches, not to mention this year’s All Ireland Football Final. I’ve been told that match was entertaining. Might have to watch it later.

While most of you were paying more attention to the Philadelphia Eagles, a completely different team of Eagles beat the Russians 13-6 in New Zealand. That win was the USA Eagles’ first Rugby World Cup win since a 2003 victory over Japan.

The USA is 1-1 at the Rugby World Cup thus far, after losing to Ireland 22-10 in their opener. What makes this particular win important, though, is this — if the Eagles’ beat Italy on September 27 (because let’s be real, they don’t have a shot against Australia on September 23) they could finish third in Pool C and clinch an automatic berth to the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England. That would be quite a feather in the Eagles’ caps, even if nobody’s banking on a third-place finish sparking a rugby revolution in this country.

Right. I promised you a Fantasy Champions League competition this year, and that’s exactly what I’m going to give you.

Dave’s Football Blog is officially opening its 2011-12 Fantasy Champions League Contest today. The winner of this contest will receive a $100 gift certificate from the good folks at SoccerPro.com. Last year, I was the winner, and I bought a Clint Dempsey jersey with those spoils. Perhaps I’ll complement it with a Megan Rapinoe jersey next June… unless you stop me!

We used ESPN SoccerNet’s system last year. It was a mess. This year, we’re going straight to the source. Here’s how to enter:

1. Go to http://en.uclfantasy.uefa.com/.
2. Build your fantasy team.
3. Click on Leagues in the top menu.
4. Click on the Create/Join tab.
5. Where it prompts you to enter a code for a private league, enter this code: 30594-6114.

And just to clarify once again, you have to beat my fantasy team in order to claim the $100 gift certificate. If nobody beats Off Constantly FC, the prize is mine.

The first Group Stage matches begin on Tuesday, September 13, so get in there quick. Good luck!

Universal Sports, the barely-known over-the-air digital channel that accompanies most NBC broadcast signals, published this grid showing what games will be shown where. Clearly, the boys at Universal want people to pay up for this. Only nine matches will be shown on free TV, and four of the six pool stage matches involve the USA team — which makes sense, given that this is the USA, but for all its recent improvements, that squad is expected to suffer at least three savage beatings in its four matches.

If you want to watch the entire competition online, Universal Sports is charging $149 for the full package, which covers all the games not shown on free TV. So you’ll still need to grab a good Mohu antenna for certain matches — or pay extra to watch them online.

If you’ve got a dish from either DirecTV and Dish Network, you can also watch World Cup matches that way — if you’ve got a lot of cash to burn. Each pay-per-view match is $24.99, and that’s for crappy 480p viewing. If you want to watch in 720p, it’s $34.99 per match, and there’s no indication that either DirecTV or Dish is offering a complete package deal for the entire competition. (If they are, they’re doing a lousy job of advertising it.)

Clearly, Universal Sports is looking to milk hardcore rugby union fans and expats for all they’re worth, rather than putting the game in front of people and showing everyone what top-level international rugby is all about. Perhaps if the NFL lockout were still going on, things would be different, but American pro football kicks off Thursday, and most sports fans in these parts will be far more concerned with Green Bay v. New Orleans than with Tonga v. New Zealand.

So your best bet for watching the Rugby World Cup might be finding a pub in your city that carries it. Trinity Hall in Dallas has a schedule of games its showing on its web site. So do the Kangaroo and Kiwi in Seattle and Finn McCool’s in New Orleans. If you know of a pub in your area showing Rugby World Cup matches, post it in the comments here. Perhaps we can build a pretty decent list of pubs here by the time this competition kicks off on Friday.

That’s because fans have this nasty tendency to prattle on about the superiority of their chosen football code like it’s their team. “Our football is the real football!”, they shout as loudly as possible, as if extra decibels can win them the argument.

Of course, they’re all ignoramuses. All those people spouting off about “real football” are completely oblivious to the fact that all football codes share a common ancestry, and that all our modern football games are merely products of their environment. Soccer and rugby both exist because some English schools had wide open fields and others didn’t. Rugby union and rugby league both exist largely because of a dispute between northern and southern Englishmen. The forward pass exists in the gridiron game in part because of one terrified Tar Heel punter. Walter Camp, the father of the gridiron game, thought the forward pass was stupid, but the Yale man’s plan to widen the field instead of adopting the forward pass was trumped by the already-built Harvard Stadium.

We fallible humans made the rules to all these games, and we can adjust those rules to suit their needs — something we do quite frequently. Is the offside rule stifling goal scoring? Let’s loosen it up a bit. Are teams clobbering wide receivers to gain an advantage? Write in an illegal contact rule. The Aussie Rules are rarely ever the same from one year to the next. This all but invalidates the notion that any particular type of football code is “real football.” It’s all just different ways of playing the game.

And people come up with new ways to play football all the time.

A few months ago, the Internet briefly went gaga over Kronum, a new sport created by some guys in Philadelphia that were tired of the old games and decided to invent something. There’s no football in the name, but the influence of soccer, rugby, Australian and Gaelic football — to say nothing of basketball and team handball — are all over this game. There’s are sections of the field where you can’t use your hands. Players have to bounce the ball to run with it. Shoulder charging appears to be legal, and there are plenty of 50-50 challenges in the air. All of these are elements of football in one form or another. There’s also a wide array of scoring opportunities into this game, too, making it a ready-made for fantasy leaguers.

Of course, first-time viewers might be baffled by the game, but it’s not as if that’s never happened with football before…

There’s a Kronum rec league in Philly that has attracted all manner of former high school and college jocks and weekend warriors who want to feel like they’re on the cutting edge of something, rather than just playing soccer and basketball like everyone else. That’s a start. However, with no published rule book, no five-ring goal kits for sale, and a flash-based mess of a web site that’s difficult to navigate and useless for attracting the notice of search engines, Kronum has a long way to go before it catches on outside of the Illadelph. Sometimes, as Walt Disney shows in the video above, it’s better to keep it simple.

That might explain why Circle Rules Football has been a bit quicker at gaining traction.

Built by an experimental theater student at NYU as a study in sport as theater — hey, they don’t call Old Trafford the “Theater of Dreams” for nothing — Circle Rules Football is also played in a circular area with only one goal in the center of everything. One team tries to get the giant yoga ball through the goal one way, while the other team tries to get it through the goal in the opposite direction. Simple as that.

At first glance, some folks will scoff at Circle Rules Football and marginalize it as “some dumb thing hipsters do.” Years ago, these same people also scoffed at the hippies playing keepie-uppie with hacky sacks in the same park, complete unaware of the fact that this activity was once the sport of emperors in Japan. Even the single goal concept borrows from certain forms of Cuju, the Chinese football game from which the Japanese Kemari was derived. You could say that Circle Rules just brings it all full circle.

Will these football games will become as widespread as other, more popular forms of football? Who knows? Some have suggested the Association game has grown too corrupt for its own good, and the continued lack of accountability at FIFA is threatening to tear the game apart. Meanwhile, the gridiron game is struggling with a growing awareness of its massive concussion problem, which might lead more parents over time to convince their children to play a different sport. Maybe Kronum and Circle Rules are coming along at just the right time to give us fun alternatives to the troubled games we already have.

Then again, maybe we’ll just keep adjusting the rules of our current games until they suit us. After all, if football teaches us anything, it’s that we can always change the game.

Maybe, but who cares? Let’s play.

Dave’s Football Blog is officially opening its 2011-12 Fantasy Premier League Contest today. This is your opportunity to A.) prove your fantasy football superiority to me — which, judging from last year’s table, shouldn’t be that difficult — and B.) win a $100 gift certificate from the good folks at SoccerPro.com.

Here’s all you need to do to enter:

1. Go to fantasy.premierleague.com.
2. Build your fantasy team.
3. Click on Leagues in the top menu.
4. Click on Join a League.
5. Where it prompts you to enter a code for a private league, enter this code: 794839-198513.

And as always, in order for the prize to be awarded, you must beat my team, Off Constantly FC. If nobody beats Off Constantly, the prize is mine. I have a red Clint Dempsey jersey hanging in my closet from last year’s Champions League Fantasy competition to prove it. (There will be a Champions League Fantasy competition this year, too. I’ll post the details to that after the group stage draw.)

The Premier League season begins August 13, so get in now before Everton has to sell someone else. Good luck!

NFL football is back. Technically, of course, NFL football never left, as this all happened from March to July, but even that thought didn’t piss on the parades of gridiron fans today as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Players Association boss DeMaurice Smith stood in front of reporters and announced that both sides agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement for the next ten years.

You could tell it was a good enough agreement from the defeated scowl on Jerry Richardson’s face at the press conference. The Carolina Panthers’ owner, who spent the entire lockout becoming the prime symbol of NFL owners’ greed and hate, stood behind Goodell and Smith today looking desperate for some new earth to scorch. Sorry, Jerry. You’ll have to pay Cam Newton after all.

So what’s next? Draft picks can begin signing with teams on Tuesday, players with bad contracts can begin getting cut on Thursday, and on Friday, teams can start shelling out ridiculous sums of money for veteran free agents — and since teams are required to be within the salary cap range (roughly $119.2M to $120.4M) by August 4, we can expect a full week of glorious, glorious chaos. The team you watched religiously last year probably won’t look much like the one you’ll watch this year.

But at least you’ll get games to watch. We get a 2011 season after all. More big plays! More big hits! More big debilitating brain bruises! Everything we shell out our hard earned cash to watch! And we get it all for the next ten years! Huzzah!

One day, Aaron Sorkin will write a movie script about this. Roger Goodell and De Smith with be the smooth-talking heroes who became best buds, and everyone else — especially the lawyers, who were reportedly even bigger villains than Richardson in all this – will be such self-aggrandizing assholes that they’ll make the Winklevoss twins look like the Olsen twins. I wonder who they’ll get to play Jerry Jones…

1.) Heather O’Reilly, U.S. Women’s National Team v. Colombia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UUJw-QX-PE

2.) Darlington Nagbe, Portland Timbers v. Sporting KC.

3.) Steve Johnson, Geelong Cats v. Essendon Bombers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wtjLzf-UAY

Hello, ladies.

(Courtesy of XmasApe and Unsilent.)

Yes, you could say it was unfortunate that Steve Cherundolo, the USA’s starting right back, sprained his ankle so soon after his team had taken a seemingly improbable lead against Mexico in the CONCACAF Gold Cup Final. Cherundolo had been one of the best players for the USA throughout the entire competition. Replacing him was a tall order.

Still, Bornstein’s entry into this game in the 11th minute sparked a resurgence in the Mexican attack, which spent the rest of the game exploiting the USA’s left flank and benefiting from an opponent’s left back who hadn’t seen any previous action in this year’s Gold Cup and was constantly out of position.

Watch the video. All four of Mexico’s goals came on attacks from the right side. Pay close attention to Bornstein’s positioning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTxtFEZqrpU

Now here’s the important question: Who chose Bornstein to replace Cherundolo? Who put a player into a game of this magnitude that had spent the entire competition on the bench?

Bob Bradley has a knack for the spectacular. When he makes the right decision, he nails it. He brought Freddy Adu, another player who hadn’t seen any Gold Cup action, into a scoreless semifinal against Panama, and Adu’s long pass perfectly set up Landon Donovan to provide Clint Dempsey with the game’s winning goal. Twitter scoffed at Adu coming into the game, but he proved Bradley right in that instance — so much so that Adu started against Mexico. El Tri respected Freddy so much that they double-teamed him most of the night. (It almost makes you wonder why he was on the bench for so long in the first place.)

But when Bob Bradley gets it wrong, as he did by starting Ricardo Clark against Ghana in the World Cup knockout stage, the explosion is quite spectacular. Bornstein was clearly the wrong man for the job here. He lacked the pace to keep up with Mexico’s speedy midfielders — especially Gio Dos Santos, who scored one goal and set up another from the right hand side — and he kept getting forward at times when he really needed to stay back.

So why would Bradley put Bornstein into this game? Was it his recent Mexican League experience? Bornstein has spent the bulk of his time with Tigres on the bench, playing only 7 games and not once playing a full 90 minutes in any of them. That seems telling. Was it his past service to this USA squad? That really didn’t mean much here, did it?

Perhaps the better question is this: what were Bradley’s options when Cherundolo went down? A quick look at the bench shows three other players that could have come on in this scenario.

A.) Jonathan Spector

Although the former West Ham player has proven to be better in midfield than at fullback recently, Spector could have replaced Cherundolo on the right side and kept the speedy Eric Lichaj on the left flank, where he would have had an easier time keeping up with Dos Santos and Pablo Barrera. The problem with Spector, though is the same as with Bornstein — he hadn’t seen any action in this tournament prior to the final.

B.) Tim Ream

While Ream had not played since his howler against Panama in the group stage, he and Clarence Goodson did play together in this competition, so he would not have been coming in cold. This would have allowed Carlos Bocanegra to shift to fullback, where he was more likely to stay back, defend and try to protect the USA’s 2-0 lead. It shows how little Bradley thought of Ream after that loss to Panama that he reached for Bornstein first.

C.) Maurice Edu

While Edu doesn’t normally play in central defense, he’s done so before, and he’s big enough and quick enough that he could have potentially disrupted the Mexican attack. What’s more Edu would have provided some flexibility in the lineup. If the USA could have held on to the lead with Goodson and Edu in the back, Bradley could then have brought in another defensive player, moved Edu into his more natural holding midfield spot and put up the Christmas tree.

Obviously, none of these choices would have been as solid as having Steve Cherundolo out there for 90 minutes, and it’s entirely possible that Mexico would have won this game regardless of who came on for Cherundolo. Still, on the basis of play, it’s impossible to argue that any of these three would have been worse than Jonathan Bornstein. That’s on Bob Bradley. He had some options here, and he clearly chose the wrong one. Also, having Timmy Chandler on the bench might have been useful, but Bradley chose not to defy the wishes of FC Nuremburg, who played the “player fatigue” card, and left him off the Gold Cup roster entirely. In retrospect, that was also a rather poor decision.

There’s not a single manager in Europe or South America who would keep his job after making a horrendous tactical decision like this and losing a lead in a final. Sadly for U.S. soccer fans, this is not Europe or South America. Mexico was the favorite in this Gold Cup and the better team on the night, and key players like Stuart Holden and Jozy Altidore were missing because of injury, so Bradley will get a pass for this. He shouldn’t. Bradley made a terrible call here, a call that just might have cost the USA a trophy and a spot in the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup. Those bad calls seem to keep adding up, don’t they?

A few days ago, Sports Illustrated‘s Grant Wahl highlighted the recent shenanigans within CONCACAF, which has led to the confederation having three different presidents in the span of two weeks. It has also led to speculation that the confederation would split, with the USA, Canada, Mexico and the 7 Central American nations cutting ties with CONCACAF’s 25 Caribbean nations — leaving high-class grifter Jack Warner to be “The People’s Champion” of a tiny group of islands that don’t amount to a hill of beans without big continental partners. (See: Oceania Football Confederation.)

It’s a pleasant thought, separating ourselves from the cesspool of corruption that seems to follow Jack Warner and his cronies around the globe. Alas, it’s also re-started the discussion of North and Central America joining forces with South America to create one large confederation. After all, who wouldn’t want to see the USA play Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in meaningful competitions more often? Think of how it would help improve the quality of our play!

The fact of the matter is that Brazil and Argentina are not very close to North America. These are two separate continents on two separate sides of the world. This makes any talk of the USA joining CONMEBOL something of a non-starter. Take notes, class. It’s time for another basic geography lesson.

One of the reasons for the talk of North and South America joining forces is the basic failure of cartography to demonstrate just how far apart the two continents are. Americans look at maps of the world and think, “Hey, South America’s in the same time zone as us, and we’re not separated by any oceans. It must be closer than Europe.”

The truth is that much of Europe is closer to the USA than the epicenters of football in South America. A visit to TravelMath.com demonstrates this. Flying from Miami, arguably the closest city to the South American continent, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, requires covering a distance of 4,163 miles. This would take a shade under 8 1/2 hours. Do you know what city is 10 miles closer to Miami in terms of flight distance? Lisbon, Portugal. It takes about the same amount of flight time to get there, too.

Of course, if you’re going to Europe, you’re probably going to leave from New York instead of Miami. New York to Lisbon is a 3,378-mile flight, which can be completed in 6 hours and 45 minutes.

Likewise, Miami to Buenos Aires, Argentina is nearly a 9-hour flight that spans 4,385 miles. This is longer than the distance from New York to London (3,471 miles), from New York to Madrid (3,595 miles), or from New York to Milan (4,028 miles). You don’t hear anyone calling for the USA to join UEFA, though, do you? Of course not. That makes no sense. There’s an ocean between Europe and the Americas.

So let’s create a scenario here where the Copa Libertadores covers both continents. Imagine for a moment a draw in that competition which puts the Seattle Sounders in the same group as Colo-Colo, champions of Chile’s Primera Division. Seattle, Washington and Santiago, Chile are 6,432 miles apart! It’s a shorter distance to Athens, Greece from Seattle (6,180 miles) than to Santiago. Plus, Santiago operates in the same time zone as New York, so those 6,432 miles also span three time zones.

What does it take to get from one city to the other and back again? It takes lots of time and a ton of jet fuel, which isn’t cheap. Traveling those distances in short time frames puts tremendous strain on players’ health and fitness. Show me one player, coach or official at Colo-Colo who wants to make that trip for a mid-week continental competition in between two key domestic league ties. Hell, show me anyone involved with the Sounders, who might find themselves flying 2,408 miles to New York prior to a tie in Santiago. Talk about jet lag! What’s more, those long multi-leg flights create a huge expense for clubs that lack the riches of the Premier League. Flying across one continent is expensive enough. Now you want to cross the equator, too?

What about the national teams, then? Well, if U.S. Soccer really harbors ambitions of getting to the World Cup every four years, why would it ever want to go through South America to get there? For that matter, why would any Central American nations? Do Belize, El Salvador and Nicaragua have the finances to compete with the giants of CONMEBOL? What guarantee do they have that the money that comes from a visit from Brazil or Argentina would pay for all that long-distance travel?

What would World Cup qualification even look like for a combined North-Central-South American confederation, anyway? Few would want a preliminary round with 5 groups of 4 teams competing to get into the round of 10. If the USA draws Brazil, Honduras and Paraguay in its group, its World Cup cycle could easily be over before it even begins. Two nights with Larissa Riquelme won’t make up for that.

Perhaps it would simply be two groups of ten drawn semi-randomly, and the top four from each group win a World Cup bid. The USA would certainly face better quality competition, but there’s no guarantee it would draw money-spinning ties with Brazil or Argentina or even arch-rival Mexico every cycle. Plus, Brazil and Argentina would refuse to be part of a World Cup qualification system in which they don’t play each other. More importantly, those long intercontinental flights won’t get any shorter during the qualifiers, thus putting physical strain on players from both continents and financial strain on national federations.

Oh, by the way, how do you think the U.S. national teams would be greeted in Venezuela and Colombia these days? Has anyone considered that?

If anything, the North and Central American nations would be better off working together to form their own 10-nation confederation modeled after CONMEBOL. This simplifies World Cup qualification — no more preliminary qualifying rounds against Barbados and St. Lucia, no more Hexagonal, just ten national teams playing each other home-and-away, with the top three advancing to the World Cup and the 4th-place team playing the 5th-place team in CONMEBOL for the last spot. It guarantees the USA competitive matches with Mexico – something Jack Warner wanted to eliminate, as you might recall. More importantly, it gets Warner out of our business, which would be a great benefit to everyone in North American football, really. Let him have his tiny island fiefdom and be forced to battle it out with the Oceania champ to get to the World Cup. Watching Trinidad & Tobago lose to New Zealand every four years would be a fitting punishment for the man, really.

In the meantime, let us please put the kibosh on this notion that the USA and its North American neighbors could join CONMEBOL. North and South America are two different continents which are too far apart to make combining their confederations feasible. There might be ways for them to work together — a 20-team Pan-American Championship every four years, for example — but in the end, everyone will be better off with North and South America having their own confederations and their own championships. Maybe the USA and Mexico will remain big fish in a small pond, but that doesn’t seem to be hurting FC Barcelona and Real Madrid these days, does it?

Sure, there will still be some drunken fools in some English pub somewhere who will say that Lionel Messi never would have done this at the Brittania. Even they do so half-jokingly. What matters is that Messi can’t seem to help breaking ducks in Champions League Finals. He’s a habitual duck breaker.

“What’s that? I can’t score a goal with my head?” Doink.

“What’s that? I can’t score a goal in England?” Boom.

The arguments about Messi are now permanently elevated from “best player now” to “best player ever.” He has reached this pantheon just weeks before his 24th birthday. There is little left to do but sit back and watch what he does next. Sure, the Maradona contingent will continue to grumble that he hasn’t won a World Cup yet, but so long as FIFA’s corporate partners look the other way and the breakaway drums don’t start beating, he seems likely to get at least two more shots at it.

2.) Football fans everywhere.

We needed a good watchable game like that, didn’t we? After Barcelona’s shamefully childish display in the semifinal tie against Real Madrid, it was somewhat gratifying to see a Champions League Final live up to its billing. Those sports fans in the USA who started growing more curious about international football after the last World Cup were treated to a grand display of club football at its highest level. They’ll be back. They might even join those raucous crowds at MLS games before it’s over.

There it is, America. We’re here. We like soccer. Get used to it.

3.) Ashley Young and Luka Modric.

You could see it on Sir Alex Ferguson’s face throughout the 2nd half of that game: Manchester United’s midfield wasn’t good enough. Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes were too old, Michael Carrick couldn’t keep up, Antonio Valencia and (for the short time he was out there) Nani were all but invisible, and Ji-Sung Park was effectively negated. United may have been good enough to win the Premier League, but they were clearly over-matched here, and with no truly promising midfield prospects in their ranks, they’ll have to go out and buy some.

Young and Modric will be the Red Devils’ top targets this summer. The pending sale of Dimitar Berbatov will finance at least one of them. Others might be cleared out as well to make room for these two and perhaps more. The only thing for sure is that Sir Alex’s midfield will look completely different by next August.

4.) Cesc Fabregas.

For all the praise that’s been heaped on Barcelona and Spain this weekend, a few (including our pal Brian Phillips) have already suggested that we could be nearing the end of this run for this club and this country. Why? They’ve played a ton of games in the last four years. Eventually, even the best peter out. The 2011 Los Angeles Lakers can tell you all about that. Keeping up that level of excellence requires an immunity to fatigue that few humans possess.

This is why Cesc Fabregas’ wish to return to Camp Nou will be fulfilled this summer. In order to maintain this level of greatness, Xavi and Iniesta will need to rest a little more often, and who better to fill their shoes than the Barca product who’s been captaining an elite Premier League squad for the last two years?

Also, although we’ve heard nothing like this yet, don’t be too shocked if Zlatan Ibrahimovic ends up being the makeweight for this transfer. He has a knack for being on teams that win domestic trophies. Arsenal could use someone like that right about now.

5.) Me.

In the last three days, I’ve lost my day job and won a replica jersey. This must be what being a Birmingham City supporter feels like.

This proved to be a much easier contest to win, given that I only had to beat 5 other challengers, rather than 212 in our Fantasy Premier League competition. As I said from the beginning, though, you must beat Off Constantly to claim your prize, and nobody did. So there. Better luck next time, everyone.

I’m fearing the worst today.

This is probably not the proper reaction to have to the UEFA Champions League Final. It’s the big day! It’s Europe’s answer to Super Bowl Sunday, and more people are watching this! Two massive clubs, both domestic champions, battle it out to be champions of the continent! What more could you want?

An entertaining game would be the thing, and I have a sinking feeling we’re not going to get it.

Why? Because stakes is high today, folks, and the higher the stakes, the less the competitors want to push the action. This is true in rugby as well as soccer. Teams competing in finals tend to sit back and wait for someone else to make the mistake, and the end result is a game with little action that’s difficult to watch. This was especially true in the 2010 World Cup Final, where Spain did its tiki-taka dance while the Netherlands sat back (and occasionally practiced martial arts techniqes) and waited for the clock to run out.

Guess what? At least half that Spain squad will be wearing Barcelona jerseys today, and they’ll be doing that same tiki-taka dance, while Manchester United will sit back and wait for a counter-attack opportunity. And why not? Jose Mourinho proved last year that sitting back and countering works, and United’s skill on the counter pretty much won them the Premier League.

This is not, however, a recipe for truly exciting football. We could be in for long stretches of precision passing that result in absolutely nothing. You can already hear the last few soccer haters in America quoting that Simpsons episode.

Nevertheless, we’ll watch. As Richard Whittall reminded us yesterday:

With football, there’s always hope you’ll be there to witness the next historical moment, the next lucky bounce, the next moment when Teddy Sheringham equalizes and Ole Gunnar Solskjær wins in the last minute for United, the next incredible Zidane goal in a CL final.

Or, to give it an American perspective, the next Landon Donovan game winner in stoppage time. Yes, we might get the Barcelona squad that cried en masse to the ref that Pepe gave them a boo boo, but we might also get this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TivoloYG-go

And that’s why we watch football. We want to remember where we are when that happens.

I would say we should hope for a truly grand final today, but as football reminds us, it’s the hope that kills you. But what the hell? It’s the Champions League Final. Let’s watch together anyway. Follow me on Twitter for live commentary. I’ll have beer. You should, too.

For finishing top of a table with more than 200 entries, Joe will receive a $100 gift certificate to SoccerPro.com, which has licensed jerseys for all the big European clubs and MLS clubs, plus plenty of gear for players. Congratulations, Joe.

And where was I during all this?

Yep, there I am, comfortably mid-table but not even close to getting a whiff of the top — kind of like Everton, except I waited until after the start of the calendar year to take my title-costing tumble. I’m happy with a top-50 finish this year, though. Keeping up with this team for 38 rounds is a lot tougher than keeping up with the World Cup for month.

Or keeping up with the Champions League….

There’s one more prize on offer, folks. Stay tuned.

This has become cliché to the point of absurdity. The game already has a foothold here. The number of World Cup viewers in America nearly doubled from 2006 to 2010. People fill pubs on Saturday mornings and shell out for satellite TV to watch it. In terms of average attendance, Major League Soccer (16,675) is close to achieving parity with the NBA (17,520) and the NHL (17,460). Soccer is here. Get used to it.

That old lens, though, which is clearly made from Gorilla Glass, still tempts us to look. We see young American players doing amazing things, and we want to push forward ten years and see them as superstars that win us big prizes. We’re already calling 18-year-old Juan Agudelo The Future of American Soccer because not only does he have 2 goals in 4 caps with the U.S. national team, but he can do things like this:

We’ve been down this road before, though. We declared Freddy Adu was The Future, and look where he ended up. Jozy Altidore got similar treatment, and while he’s clearly done much better on the international level, his club career has floundered since he left New York. We spent so much time hyping their potential that we ignored their kinetic. What have they accomplished? What are they doing now?

Perhaps we’ll have grown — not as a “soccer nation,” but as fans in general — when we stop viewing someone like Agudelo for what he will be and just appreciate him for what he is. He’s a young player with a lot of talent who just happens to be playing with (and learning from) one of the best strikers in the game. As Messi imitated Maradona, so Agudelo is imitating Thierry Henry. So long as this kid avoids major injuries and drunken car crashes, he’ll be good and possibly great.

The Future, however, still remains perched in our heads like a hungry vulture, swirling around any player or event that can somehow “raise the profile” of this game.

Which brings us to Real Salt Lake.

In case you missed it last week, as most casual fans did, the 2009 MLS Cup champs managed a 2-2 draw against Monterrey in Mexico in the final round of the CONCACAF Champions League. They play the second leg tonight in Utah, and if Real Salt Lake either wins or manages a 0-0 or 1-1 draw at home, where temperatures in the low 40s are bound to make the Mexican side just a little uncomfortable, they will be the first MLS club to win this new Champions League and earn a bid to the FIFA Club World Cup.

As you can see from the video, pretty much all of MLS wants seems to want this to happen. MLS didn’t even care that much for the CONCACAF Champions League a few years ago. Now that there’s an MLS club proving itself capable of beating a Mexican club over two legs, however, MLS is putting all its marketing muscle behind supporting RSL. That draw in Mexico made the entire league feel like it’s finally achieving parity with the Primera División. It made MLS feel like a grown-up.

Perhaps it’s the single-entity nature of the league that encourages this sudden rush of love for RSL. Perhaps it’s the USA’s deep-and-growing-deeper rivalry with our neighbors to the south. Either way, tonight’s second leg has become the sort of milestone that brings The Future back into focus. After all, if MLS is now on par with the Mexican top flight, imagine where it might be ten years from now.

The real sign of MLS’ maturity, though, is that it’s even embracing this competition in the first place. Perhaps when fans react to this sort of boosterism by saying, “Dude, I’m not supporting them,” the same way Chelsea fans will look down their noses at Manchester United in the UEFA Champions League, MLS will truly be able to sit at the adult table.

That leaves us to ask what a Real Salt Lake win tonight really means, and the answer is this: 1.) the club champions of North America will be based in Utah, which nobody ever expected to see, 2.) no matter what happens this MLS season, RSL will play in Japan in December, and 3.) Jason Kreis is a damn good manager whose team-building prowess just might get him a look from some clubs outside of the USA, and wouldn’t that be something?

Oh, by the way, Jason Kreis is a Duke grad. That might make a few Americans out there back Monterrey tonight.

Regardless, the real lesson of this game, and perhaps the real lesson of Association football in general, is that we should stop thinking about The Future and learn to celebrate these moments in the present. When Landon Donovan scored that game-winner against Algeria last June, all that mattered in that moment was that we won and we advanced in the World Cup. When the USA upset Spain to reach the Confederations Cup Final in 2009, all that mattered was “We #$*%ing BEAT SPAIN!”

RSL fans will hope to experience that on a smaller scale tonight, but it certainly won’t seem any less important to them. For at least 90 minutes, they get to live in the moment they’re in. We may never see Real Salt Lake v. Real Madrid, but tonight, that doesn’t matter. Whatever will be, will be. We’re here to witness this game, this moment. That, my friends, is truly worth celebrating.

There are times when Sergio Ramos is an absolutely brilliant footballer. Both Spain and Real Madrid keep him around in the hope that those moments of brilliance outnumber the moments when he’s a complete and utter klutz.

Like this moment, for example. Real Madrid knocked off Barcelona, 1-0, in the Copa Del Rey final yesterday, thanks to 120 minutes of stifling defense and one pinpoint Angel di Maria cross that found Cristiano Ronaldo’s head and became a brilliant goal. It was Real’s first trophy in three years, its first Copa Del Rey since 1993 and, perhaps most importantly, its first win over Barcelona since Pep Guardiola took over as manager in 2008.

It’s that last part that made Real feel like partying. Sometimes at the party, though, things get broken. This video is pretty much Sergio Ramos’ career in a nutshell.

I suppose if there’s a bright side to this, it’s that Sergio Ramos can no longer claim getting his pocket picked by Clint Dempsey in a major international semifinal as the most embarrassing moment of his life.

Simple. We shall turn our attention… to football.

See? The President knows. He’s already way ahead of the game. It’s football season once again… in Australia.

For those of you who have read the blog for a while and know all about Australian Rules Football, this post isn’t for you. This is for your friends who don’t know what Aussie Rules is all about — you know, the ones that always say, “Oh, you mean rugby, right?” No, my friends, we do not mean rugby. Yes, they play rugby in Australia, and that’s all well and good, but the Australian Football League is very different animal — not to mention an incredibly popular one. The AFL has the highest per capita attendance of any sports league on the planet, and only three sports leagues on the planet — the NFL, the Indian Premier League and the Bundesliga — have higher average attendance than AFL.

So what makes Aussie Rules so popular? Nothing less than sheer awesomeness. It’s fast-paced, it’s physical, it’s high-scoring, and once you get the rules of the game — which are pretty easy to pick up, as you’ll see below — it’s a ton of fun to watch. There’s a reason it’s been Australia’s national obsession for more than 150 years.

Of course, just because it’s been around for a century and a half doesn’t mean it isn’t new to you. This is a very different football game than you’re used to watching, so in order to understand what you’re watching, you’ll need to know what the Aussie Rules are. That way, when you fire up ESPN 3.com this week to watch your first AFL game, you’ll know exactly what it is you’re watching — and you’ll watch all the way through September.

Thus, this handy guide is for you. Follow along after the jump, my friends, and meet your new favorite sport…

Australian football started out as a way to keep cricketers fit during the winter. As a result, AFL matches are played on cricket ovals, which may be between 135 and 185 meters long. At each end of the oval are four goal posts, which are arranged like this:

The object of the game is to kick the ball through your goal posts more than your opponents kick the ball through theirs — simple enough, right? If the ball is kicked through tall those center posts, that’s a goal, which is worth 6 points. If it’s kicked through either of the side posts, that’s called a “behind,” which is only one point. It’s also a behind if the ball off the center posts. A behind is often called a “miss” by commentators. Accuracy matters here.

Each team has 18 players on the oval at once, and unlike other popular football games like soccer and rugby and American football, there’s no offside rule. That means players can pretty much run anywhere on the field, which creates a much more free-flowing game.

The game starts with a “center bounce,” which is kind of like a tip-off in basketball, except the ref bounces the ball in the center square, and two big guys called ruckmen fight to tip the ball to their teammates. Once a player gets the ball, he has four options:

1.) He can run with the ball, but he has to bounce it off the turf every 10 meters or so.

2.) He can kick the ball to a teammate or, if he’s close enough, through the goal.

3.) He can “handpass” the ball, which is an underhand punch of the ball, as demonstrated by Obama at the top of this post. (It’s gotta be punched, too. Laterals are a no-no.)

4.) He can stand there and get his ass tackled.

Players can only get tackled between the shoulders and thighs. If a player goes for another’s head or knees, that’s a penalty and a free kick for his opponent. Particularly egregious penalties can result in the ref granting the free kick 50 yards ahead of the foul. Legal tackles that result in a dead ball usually result in the ref bouncing the ball at that spot and letting the ruckmen fight for it.

While players can advance the ball toward goal by running and handpassing all day, the kicking game is important because of something called the mark. This is a big part of the game. If a player makes a clean catch of another player’s kick, he’s allowed to take a free kick from behind the spot of the catch. He only has about 5 seconds to make that kick, though, before the ref shouts, “Play on!” A player can take a mark on an opponent’s kick as well.

Thus, teams could advance the ball by kicking to each other and getting free kicks all the way down the oval, though handpasses get them out of tight spots, too. When a player gets a mark within 50 meters of the goalposts – sort of an end zone, if you will – that player gets a free kick at goal. That’s when most of the points are scored, so spoiling marks becomes increasingly important for back line players. Darrelle Revis, for example, might be a pretty good back line player in this game.

After a goal is scored, the ref brings it back to the center for a bounce, and the game continues. If a team only scores a behind, though, the opposing team gets a free kick from the goal square in front of the posts. Also, if the ball goes out of bounds, the ref gives it a backward heave back into play — unless it’s kicked directly out of bounds. Then it’s a free kick to the other team.

And that’s the game. Now that you know it, you might be thinking, ”Y’know, that sounds like fun. Where can I watch some Aussie Rules?”

ESPN used to show Aussie Rules back in the 80s, before they had the rights to show any major American sports. What goes around has come around, though. ESPN once again owns the U.S. broadcast rights to the AFL, and they plan to show up to three live matches per week on ESPN3.com. The 2011 AFL season starts Thursday, March 24, with a match between the Carlton Blues and the Richmond Tigers. ESPN2 will also show its first regular season AFL match — Geelong Cats v. Port Adelaide Power, a rematch of the 2007 AFL Grand Final — on Saturday, April 9, starting at 11:55 PM Eastern, 8:55 PM Pacific. You can get the full schedule from our friends at AFANA.

As for the AFL itself, you can follow it on the league’s official web site, and you can keep up with the basics on its Wikipedia entry. And yes, there’s a fantasy football game. It’s called SuperCoach, and you can play it here and here.

Even if you don’t jump into SuperCoach, though, you should definitely jump into Aussie Rules. It might not be the football game you know, but it’s a football game you will definitely enjoy watching.

It’s NCAA Tournament week here in America, and as the college basketball-loving masses fill out their brackets in the vain hope of actually winning a few bucks, the press turns to head coaches from schools that just missed out on invitations to the Big Dance(tm). Angry coaches whose jobs hinge on these invitations often have venom to spew, and venom makes for good stories.

It was St. Mary’s head coach Randy Bennett, however, whose venom perked my ears up the most. When his side was snubbed despite an RPI ranking of 46 — 8 teams with lower RPI rankings got at-large bids — he suggested it was time to put a little more certainty into the formula for selecting at-large teams.

“Go to BCS. Go to something where there’s a standardized number how you figure out who’s in, who’s not,” Bennett said about 10 minutes after learning his Gaels (25-8) were not one of the 37 teams to receive an at-large bid.

“Because I know the way we’re doing it now is, some teams can get a 65, 69 RPI and they’re from a big conference, the (selection committee) will find a way to make an excuse to get them in.

“Whereas from our conference, they’re not going to flip-flop that. We’re not going to get the same deal. To me, that’s not right.”

Of course, it’s easy to dismiss Bennett’s suggestion, since nobody really likes the Bowl Championship Series. The problem here is that he’s using the wrong sporting metaphor. What Bennett wants is not a system that resembles the BCS, but a system that resembles the UEFA Champions League.

As a long-time college basketball fan, I got more into European football largely because of its competitive parallels to college basketball. Think of domestic leagues as conferences, domestic cups as conference tournaments, and the Champions League and Europa League as the NCAA Tournament and the NIT. The parallels are far from exact, of course, but they do exist.

There are two key differences, though, between the NCAA Tournament and the UEFA Champions League. First, the former is an end-of-season competition whose participants are determined based on that season’s results, while the latter is an all-year competition whose participants are determined by the previous season’s results. Second, with the former, the number of participants from each conference isn’t known until the final bracket is announced, but with the latter, every league knows exactly how many teams will qualify.

And that seems to be what Bennett wants for the NCAA Tournament — a formula that determines how many teams from each conference will make it in every year. So how do we come up with that formula? Let’s take a closer look at how UEFA does it first.

Every year, we know from the jump street exactly how many clubs from each country will make it into next season’s UEFA Champions League. These numbers are determined by UEFA’s league coefficient, which measures clubs’ performance in both the Champions League and the Europa League over the course of several years. English clubs’ consistent success in UEFA competitions means the top four Premier League clubs get Champions League bids. Meanwhile, German clubs have done better than Italian clubs in recent years, so starting next season, the top four Bundesliga clubs will earn Champions League bids, while only the top three Serie A clubs will get in, instead of the other way around.

That Juventus allowed this to happen didn’t help Italy’s coefficient very much. (One day, I would love to hear how Gus Johnson would call that goal…)

It makes less sense, though, to judge college basketball teams’ worthiness based on five years of performance in the NCAA Tournament, because while roster turnover might be frequent in European soccer, it’s guaranteed in college basketball. Players graduate. Some leave early. For the Big East to benefit for five years just because Carmelo Anthony had one good run at Syracuse doesn’t seem all that fair.

So let’s look at this from a different angle. What does college basketball have that European soccer doesn’t? Regular season non-conference games. UEFA bases its coefficients on performance in the Champions League and Europa League because those are the only real competitive games that pit clubs from different countries against each other. College basketball teams, on the other hand, schedule plenty of non-conference opponents during a season, and all those games help determine the RPI rankings, which take into account strength of schedule and opponents’ strength of schedule.

What Bennett might be suggesting, then, is taking the focus away from individual teams’ RPI rankings and putting it toward the Conference RPI. Those conference rankings would then determine just how many schools from each conference would make it to the NCAA Tournament. This is something the NCAA could announce on, say, February 1, and it would fluctuate a bit as the season progressed and more games were played.

One end result from this sort of system would be a greater emphasis on the regular season — an idea that some coaches would certainly endorse. If everyone knows at some point that the top four, top five or top seven teams will get bids, they’ll fight a little harder for those positions in January and February. In smaller conferences that only get two or three bids, winning the regular season becomes even more paramount. What’s more, ESPN’s late-February “Judgment Week,” which pits non-conference hopefuls against each other, would have greater impact on conferences as a whole. Bids could shift around a bit based on those results. Then, on the Monday before Selection Sunday, the bids are locked, and everyone knows where they stand.

Those teams that got the final conference bid, however, would become the new bubble teams. This is where conference tournaments enter the picture, because it’s the tournament champion, not the regular season champion, that currently gets the automatic bid. (Imagine the FA Cup winner getting a spot in the Champions League instead of the Europa League — something that is periodically discussed as a means of injecting life into the FA Cup, but is unlikely to happen anytime soon.) For those teams that didn’t qualify in the regular season, the conference tourney becomes the last chance saloon — and that chance would come at the expense of the bubble team. So if a conference won, say, five bids, a tournament champion that finished outside of the top five could replace that 5th-place team in the NCAA tourney.

That changes the dynamic of the big conference tournaments just a little. The qualified schools are playing to improve their seeding in the NCAA tourney — Duke probably would not have gotten a #1 seed this year without winning the ACC Tournament — while the bubble team is playing to protect its bid, and the remaining teams are playing to take that last bid away. What’s more, at this point, no upsets outside a conference would impact the number of bids it would get. And for small conferences that earn only one bid… well, same as it ever was, really.

This sort of system would remove that uncertainty that had Randy Bennett scratching his head as to why his St. Mary’s team didn’t make it in. If he knew in advance that only one West Coast Conference school would qualify for the NCAA tourney, he would know exactly how important that WCC final against Gonzaga was — and so would everyone else. The drama of that game trumps the drama of the big bracket reveal on CBS, which left St. Mary’s and its fans looking foolish on camera. Imagine if Tottenham Hotspur and Sampdoria had to sit in a room and wait to see if the UEFA picked them to play in the Champions League. Ridiculous, right? They unquestionably earned their bids with their play. I think that’s what we want to see in college basketball, too.

Would the NCAA even consider such a system, though? And would college basketball fans buy into it? That’s my question to you, hoops fans. How are you with this Champions League-style system for NCAA basketball? Have your say in the comments below. Let’s kick this one around a bit.

For this, Judge Doty was named Kissing Suzy Kolber’s Meast of the Week. So now the Minneapolis-based judge has two things in common with Prince. I believe the new appropriate term for this is WINNING.

I would share my thoughts on this ruling, except that my pal Bomani Jones already vocalized those exact same thoughts this morning. So just hit that play button below and listen, and remember — I told you about this game the owners were playing a year ago.

Part of the NFL’s wretched conservatism comes from the luxury of having four downs, the first two of which are usually spent throwing short routes or just pounding meaninglessly into the line because “you have to establish the run.” This hasn’t been true since the late 20th century, but it does not stop the calcified offensive minds of the NFL from wasting play after play in the vain pursuit of some kind of idea of “balance.”

Fine, if what we’re doing is trying to make more football out of the lullsome game professional football can be, then we’ll have to counterintuitively take away the luxury of one of your downs. If you want first down to mean something, then fine: let’s make it mean something by forcing you to actually do something with your opportunities. Woody Hayes just rolled over in his grave, but he does that a lot now what with the kids and their Facebooks and tattoos and Pokemons and hip-hops and other Commie deviations. Pay him no mind.

That is just a tip of the awesomeness iceberg. You should read the whole thing.

I’ll throw in one additional rule change. Spencer talked about the return of the drop kick, but let’s take it a step further: every kick is a live ball. Doesn’t matter if it’s a drop kick or a punt. Any player can kick the ball from anywhere and advance the ball or score a field goal. Imagine for a moment the sort of havoc that rule could wreak on defenses.

Someone get the UFL rules committee on the horn. There’s opportunity here.

Down 6 points with two minutes to go from their own 13 yard line, Ben Roethlisberger led the Steelers’ offense on the field against a Green Bay Packers defense that had come up with big plays all night. Unlike two years ago, however, Big Ben came up short this time. Pittsburgh would not win its 7th Super Bowl. Instead, Green Bay would win its 4th.

It was Roethlisberger’s first-half performance, however, that helped to undo the Steelers. He threw two key interceptions in the first half, both of which led to Packers touchdowns. One of those picks was returned for a touchdown, which led Fox to reveal the ominous stat that teams who returned interceptions for touchdowns in the Super Bowl were 10-0.

The Steelers got up off the mat, though, cutting Green Bay’s 21-3 lead to 21-17 and looking for all the world like they were going to turn the Super Bowl on its head. That’s when the Packers’ defense made its biggest play of the night. Clay Matthews forced Rashard Mendenhall to fumble the ball, which the Packers recovered. That lead to another Green Bay touchdown, giving them a 28-17 lead and all but sealing the game.

Green Bay’s 21 points of turnovers, however, would not have been possible without the ultimate failure of the Pittsburgh secondary. For most of this season, the Steelers have gotten away with having less-than-stellar cornerbacks, largely because their blitz had been so effective. That wasn’t the case in this Super Bowl. Green Bay picked up the blitz effectively all night, giving Aaron Rodgers the time he needed to tear the secondary apart with one big pass play after another. If Jordy Nelson hadn’t dropped as many key passes as he caught, this could have been a blowout.

The Packers certainly deserve credit for handling the Steelers’ blitz and forcing those turnovers. Aaron Rodgers deserved his MVP award as well. The Steelers, however, will walk away from this one thinking their mistakes, rather than Rodgers’ performance, ultimately cost them a 7th Lombardi Trophy. It’s awfully hard to argue otherwise. The offense didn’t take care of the ball, and the defense left receivers wide open. That’s not exactly a recipe for winning football.

I know, I know, it’s not the day to think about such things. It is indeed America’s sporting national holiday, Super Bowl Sunday, and as you might expect, I have absolutely no hope of being objective today. My team gets to play in the big finale, and I’m going to get psyched about that and do my best to ignore what’s coming.

How psyched? I’ve been invited to three Super Bowl parties today, and if I can help it, I’m going to all of them.

You can follow my exploits today on Twitter, where I’m sure I’ll be swinging the Twerrible Towel, sharing various things I hear from friends throughout the day, ignoring the halftime show to switch parties, and eating my weight in food. (The amount of driving I’m doing will limit my beer intake today. Hence, the excess in food, because what is America if not excess?)

If you’re looking for serious game coverage, check out our pals at Shutdown Corner and Steelers Lounge. If you need a laugh, Kissing Suzy Kolber will have plenty of them. If you’re just watching for the commercials… well, unless you enjoy watching Two and a Half Men, expect disappointment today. And that’s the only prediction you’re getting from me. My lack of objectivity today demands it.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday. Enjoy the game today, folks, and all the madness that surrounds it. It’s gonna be a glorious day.

GO STEELERS!

In November 2002, a federal court appointed Burbank special master of the National Football League. In that role, he resolves certain categories of disputes between the NFL Players Association and the NFL Management Council under a consent decree and collective bargaining agreement.

Yesterday, Professor Burbank issued a ruling in a dispute between NFL owners and the NFLPA. In this dispute, which I wrote about last summer, the NFLPA claimed that the league negotiated the terms of its television contracts in bad faith, asking for less money than it could have gotten in exchange for guaranteed contracts. The NFLPA asked that the money, estimated at $4 billion, be put into an escrow account until a new collective bargaining agreement is established.

Professor Burbank ruled against the NFLPA. The league and its owners are free to collect that TV money.

Thus, for all intents and purposes, Professor Burbank has ruled in favor of the cancellation of the 2011-12 NFL season. He has given the owners a $4 billion war chest that it can use as leverage against the players. He has given the owners free reign to lock out players unless they agree to play more games for less money and fewer benefits. He has allowed the owners to shut down operations for a full year starting March 4, taking millions of dollars out of the economies of 32 major cities, 4 major television networks and countless other workers and businesses that rely on the NFL for at least a portion of their livelihoods.

In short, Professor Burbank is a douche.

The NFLPA has already stated its intent to file an appeal in U.S. Federal District Court in Minneapolis, where Judge David Doty presides. The NFL has issues with Judge Doty. Three years ago, the league demanded that he remove himself from his role as overseer of the league’s CBA after he ruled that Michael Vick could keep a large portion of his bonus money. Naturally, the league claims he is biased in favor of the players, while the NFLPA clearly hopes for a more favorable ruling on appeal. If you want NFL football next September, you should hope for the same, because as of right now, Super Bowl XLV will be the last NFL game you see for a while.

These images have been kicking around these here interwebs for the last couple of days. You’re probably wondering where they came from.

They are the work of one Jimmy Nutini, an aspiring designer and self-proclaimed “logo nerd” from Rhode Island who wondered what NFL jerseys might look like if they were soccer shirts. So he grabbed a template pack for Photoshop and had at it, posting the results here.

Those results have been most impressive thus far. I would love to see the NFL make these designs available as actual shirts — replacing the ads with numbers, of course, because nobody really wants to be a walking ketchup billboard. Granted, the current NFL regime would probably be more likely to send young Jimmy a cease-and-desist letter for “unauthorized use of NFL logos” — which would be pigheaded and dumb, but in light of recent events, far from atypical.

You can see the all the designs Jimmy has released thus far after the jump. As much as the Seahawks’ color scheme still annoys me, these Seahawks shirts look better than anything the Sounders have worn in the last decade.

This is what they did yesterday instead.

Notice how nobody seemed all that interested in hitting anyone. There was no blitzing, no real blocking (it wasn’t really needed), and no tackling. This might have been the players deciding that they weren’t going to risk their bodies in a meaningless exhibition game for a league that doesn’t seem so interested in their well-being these days. Then again, maybe this is a sign that the Pro Bowl has simply outlived its usefulness and needs to be taken out to the woodshed.

But whatever shall we do for our football fix the week before the Super Bowl, you ask? Here, I’ve got a solution for you. It borrows a concept from the Australian Football League — specifically, its pre-season NAB Cup. We’ll call this… drum roll, please… The Rozelle Cup.

Here’s how the Rozelle Cup works: you start with all 32 teams, selected semi-randomly to play against each other in Week 1 of the pre-season. Winners advance, losers drop out and play standard exhibitions for remainder of August. By week 2, you’re down to 16. By week 3, 8 are left. By week 4, 4 teams remain. The winners of those last two games play for the cup the week before the Super Bowl.

Suddenly, the usually boring NFL pre-season is a lot more interesting. The need for an 18-game season disappears, because now you can use the Rozelle Cup to sell games that are more competitive in August. Teams have more than one shot at glory, and players fighting for jobs can make themselves stand out even more.

The downside? No NFL team would want to play in both the Super Bowl and the Rozelle Cup final. The likelihood of this happening is fairly slim, though, and after a few years, perhaps “winning the double” would become a truly impressive achievement in American football, too.

What does everyone think of this idea? Better than an 18-game season? Would you rather see a competitive cup final the week before the Super Bowl instead of an exhibition game where players are so openly apathetic? Let’s hear it, people.

The uncertainty is always there. In the divisions of American soccer below MLS — and occasionally, as a few Florida residents might tell you, in MLS itself — there’s always a chance that the club you support won’t be around for very long. Club owners arrive with big talk of making soccer work in this town, only to be kicked in the chest by economic reality. No current American soccer club is more than 20 years old, and only 8 clubs currently in the lower divisions have lasted more than a decade, many of them keeping shoestring budgets and low expectations. The clubs that overreach end up being the ones that collapse the fastest.

And so it goes with the club I’ve supported for the last four years.

The owners of the Carolina Railhawks filed dissolution papers last December to shut down the companies that ran the club. Team president Brian Wellman told reporters that the “current owners just don’t want to be involved anymore.” The remains of the club were sold to Traffic Sports USA, which now has majority ownership of four of the eight clubs that were set to play in the new North American Soccer League this year.

Yesterday, it hit home. What was left of the Railhawks organization put everything up for sale. The Railhawks trademark is up for auction on eBay, and everything from leftover jerseys to training pylons to the team’s mascot costume was advertised on Craigslist.

Yes, they’re selling Swoops. It has indeed come to this.

Technically, there’s still a club here, but unless Traffic Sports wins the trademark auction, it won’t be called the Railhawks. Traffic is simply propping up a shell club, just like it’s doing in Atlanta, Miami and Minnesota. For this reason, the U.S. Soccer Federation announced this month that it has preliminarily declined to sanction the NASL as a Division 2 league in 2011, claiming the league no longer meets the new financial standards for Division 2. The league could reapply for Division 3 sanctioning, but the current NASL leadership is suggesting it’s Division 2 or bust for the NASL.

If you’re looking for a reason why Sunil Gulati is hesitant to sanction a league that is practically half-owned by Traffic Sports, look no further than the story of Gale Agbossoumonde, the young Togolese immigrant who is a rising star in the U.S. National Team. The teenage defender turned away what he believed to be a lowball contract offer from MLS to sign his rights over to Traffic. In turn, Traffic wrecked Agbossoumonde’s transfer to Portuguese club Braga, and he’s been in limbo ever since.

This is part of Traffic’s core business — finding young players, filling their heads with dreams of European glory, signing them to contracts and selling those contracts to clubs for profits. It’s often a shady business, and it clearly raises the hackles of the powers that be at both U.S. Soccer and MLS. They don’t seem so interested in associating themselves with Traffic. As a result, the NASL now sits in limbo.

As do I. The Agbossoumonde story has left me wondering if I really want to spend my money supporting a club that’s owned by Traffic. Sure, they say they’re simply holding these clubs until investors come along — which isn’t much different than the first decade of MLS, really — but who’s buying? If these clubs were money-making propositions, Selby Wellman would not have dissolved the Railhawks organization and held a fire sale for its remnants.

What’s more, Traffic is practically the only remaining entity left from the cabal that broke away from United Soccer Leagues. The Wellmans have sold out. Jeff Cooper’s supposed soccer empire in St. Louis fell apart most ignominiously. The Saputo family ponied up to join MLS in 2012. The NASL is Traffic’s show now, and while the league is moving forward with plans for the upcoming season, how committed are they beyond this? How do we know they, too, won’t close up shop the moment they don’t want to spend the money anymore?

That’s the reality of lower-division soccer in America, especially in the Southeast. There’s been talk of MLS returning to Florida or teaming up with Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank to put a team there, but talk is all it has been, and it hasn’t been backed up by fan support. Cities like Seattle, Portland, Montreal and Vancouver could boast large, loyal fan bases, and that attracted the investment cash necessary to put those clubs in MLS. Those cities supported lower-division soccer. The big Southeastern markets haven’t, and the owners who invested in it over the years have yet to prove they know how to make it work.

So just like Philadelphia had for much of the last decade, we have a supporters club here in the Raleigh-Durham area, but we no longer have a club to support. We only have memories of the last four years — the songs we sang on the terraces, the drums we pounded to push our boys forward, the Southern Derby Cup victory in Charleston, the 9-0 drubbing of Miami FC, the U.S. Open Cup win over Chicago, that painful Open Cup loss to Wilmington the following season, the night the Cary police had to separate the Montreal Impact players from the refs, the beers and nachos at the pub after the match. We made friendships there that will hopefully last a lifetime. That camaraderie was the reason we kept supporting the Railhawks right up until the very end. It’s at the heart of what makes being a football supporter so great. Perhaps we’ll do it all again when the next club rolls into town.

Until then…

We’ll be comin’! We’ll be comin’!
We’ll be comin’ down the rails!
When you hear that noise from those Carolina boys,
We’ll be comin’ down the rails!

]]> http://www.davesfootballblog.com/post/2011/01/28/requiem-for-an-american-soccer-club/feed/ 5 http://www.davesfootballblog.com/post/2011/01/25/this-is-what-being-a-football-fan-looks-like/ http://www.davesfootballblog.com/post/2011/01/25/this-is-what-being-a-football-fan-looks-like/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:12:47 +0000 Dave http://www.davesfootballblog.com/?p=6239 …when your team loses a big one.

Our pal Gary Vaynerchuk has always worn his heart on his sleeve when it comes to the New York Jets, so it’s little surprise to see this reaction from him after the Pittsburgh Steelers stomped his Jets for 30 minutes, then held them at bay just enough in the 2nd half to win the AFC Championship and get to Super Bowl XLV. I imagine he was far from the only Jets fan attempting to drown his sorrows on Sunday night.

Say this for the Jets, though — Rex Ryan has made them more fun to follow than any other team in the NFL. If they had won on Sunday, they would have made the next two weeks awfully entertaining. As a Steelers fan, I’d like to think I could have dealt with losing to the Jets a lot more than losing to, say, the Ravens or the Patriots. On the other hand, I’m glad I don’t have to.

Also, as awesome as Rex Ryan is, I would never trade Mike Tomlin for him. Tomlin is the mutt’s nuts.

As for the NFC Championship, I leave you with Spencer Hall’s must-read piece on Jay Cutler and the reaction to his being pulled from the game. The only thing I could possibly add to that is this: Why is no one suggesting that Cutler just got benched? Hockey goalies having bad nights get pulled from games all the time. Why shouldn’t it be the same for quarterbacks? Why is everyone questioning Cutler’s toughness and ignoring the fact that he was just stinking up the joint? And how is this so different from what happened to Jim Kelly in 1993? Aside from the fact that Caleb Hanie is no Frank Reich, of course.