I am a big fan of high-school football coaches. Starting with the guy (Jim Young) I played for in high school and continuing on through nearly every prep football coach I came in contact with during my four decades in sports journalism. I guessed, in this blog post, that I covered around 400 prep football […]

[Read more →]

The NFL has seen a surge of player jerseys with more than just one name above the big number on a guy’s back. I am perhaps late to noticing this because while living in Abu Dhabi the NFL was pretty much inaccessible. I missed about six years of developments while there. Including the arrival of […]

[Read more →]

Ask American sports fans what he or she can tell you about the New York Cosmos … and I’m guessing 90 percent of them will say, “Zip. Nada”. Maybe 1 percent will say, “Cosmos? Did you mean Galaxy?” The Cosmos were the American soccer team that the rest of the world sorta cared about. Without […]

[Read more →]

I feel confident in saying I am as big a soccer fan as anyone in my age cohort who was born and raised in the United States. Came to the game late, got involved as a self-taught AYSO coach, volunteered to cover the U.S. national team, saw Paul Caligiuri’s Shot Heard Round the World, went […]

[Read more →]

His given name was Luiz Carlos Saroli, but he was known by the informal Caio Junior, going back to his playing days in Portugal and his native Brazil. And that is how we referred to him in the pages of The National while he coached in the UAE. He died in a plane crash tonight, […]

[Read more →]

I realized this weekend I have moved into a form of Premier League partisanship that revolves around a single question: What is best for Bob Bradley? Bradley is the coach of Swansea City, a club already mired in a fight to avoid the disaster of relegation. Bradley is the American coach of Swansea City, and […]

[Read more →]

College football is huge in the U.S.  Any American who saw any of the big games today knows that. American college basketball isn’t far behind football, especially when we consider March Madness, when John Q. Public becomes a fan of whichever Cinderella is dancing. Could make a case that college baseball and softball have their […]

[Read more →]

Rugby is the most significant global sport I had never seen in person. That void on the resume has been addressed. Tonight, our French friend, a rugby aficionado, took us to see an international match at the nearby “big” city, Beziers. The U.S. women’s national rugby team, versus France’s women, at the Stade de la […]

[Read more →]

Jurgen Klinsmann was fired today and it looks as if the U.S. Soccer Federation is taking our advice on another matter, too: Bruce Arena as the new/old U.S. national team coach. That would be Bruce Arena, he of five MLS Cup championships, three with the LA Galaxy, and a quarterfinals run at the 2002 World […]

[Read more →]

It’s time. Jurgen Klinsmann must go. He now is inflicting real damage on the U.S. national soccer team. The U.S. Soccer Federation really has only One Job that fans insist it complete: Qualification for the Fifa World Cup. A limp and lifeless U.S. team was crushed 4-0 in Costa Rica tonight. The U.S. has lost […]

[Read more →]