USA Men's Soccer to take long vacation - Time for Immigration reform or to annex Mexico

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Double dose of defeat Saturday destroys hope for any international competition for USA men!

In a nutshell - we suck!!!

USA Men's Under 23

The U.S. men’s under-23 soccer team lost to Honduras 2-0 with a Rio Olympic berth at stake in Sandy, Utah, on Saturday afternoon.

To qualify for Rio, the U.S. must now beat Canada on Tuesday and then beat Colombia in March in Rio de Janeiro.

The U.S. failed to qualify for the 2004 and 2012 Olympic tournaments and has not won a men’s soccer medal since 1904, when the Olympic tournament included three teams.

The U.S. looked strong in the CONCACAF going into the Honduras match.

It went 3-0 in group play, outscoring opponents 13-2, despite all three 2014 World Cup players who met the U-23 age requirement being omitted from the roster — John Brooks, Julian Green and DeAndre Yedlin. Brooks and Yedlin were saved for a senior national team match against Mexico on Saturday with a  2017 Confederations Cup berth at stake, though Brooks is now out due to injury.

Honduras, which qualified for its third straight Olympics, went 2-1 in its group, the loss to

Mexico.

USA Men's National Team

Mexico defeats USA 3-2 in CONCACAF soccer playoff game

The US Men's National Team fell to Mexico Saturday night on a late goal in excruciating fashion on their home soil on Saturday night.

The U.S. equalized in the 108th minute to put the teams tied at 2-2, but a goal by Paul Aguilar in the 118th minute made it 3-2 Mexico in a CONCACAF playoff game at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.

The time is now for Immigration Reform

Continued embarrassment of men's soccer in the USA should convince the dysfunctional politicians running Washington into the ground to shut up and do something for the good of the nation.

The conservatives should bite their gums or guns, the liberals should bite their condoms, and both should shut up with their incessant finger-pointing and pathetic polarizing pathos.

Our men's soccer team sucks and it is an international sign of the collapse of the American standard of greatness.  We do not need Einstein to tell us the teams from Central and South America are kicking our butts, we need action.

Congress and the Obama Administration must immediately pass Immigration reform and it must include instant citizenship for all foreigners in the country illegally.  Forget about pathways to citizenship and all the other crap.

Maybe we can find enough good soccer players in the eleven million illegal immigrants to mount a men's soccer team and if not, at least we will have a new generation of kids to build a long- range program.

If the oracles in our nation's capitol cannot do this, then we must find a way to annex the rest of Mexico and declare them all US citizens since we did a pretty good job of taking about half of Mexico so far.

One way or the other, we cannot tolerate losers such as the Men's soccer team, it does not fit the American ideal or standard.

Wake up Washington, give us the team we deserve, declare all illegal residents legal citizens for the interest of our national pride, and for the ratings for our television networks.

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'College GameDay' a major coup for Cats - as in University of Arizona

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Publisher's note - Arizona is my alma mater...

If your school is selected to host ESPN’s “College GameDay”, it’s like somebody scheduled a parade and everybody you know is going to be there.

About two million people climb out of bed every Saturday morning to watch the show and it almost never disappoints. It’s Army-Navy, Kansas-Missouri and in 2001, 2001, 2008 and 2009 it was Texas-Oklahoma in the Red River Rivalry.

Eleven hours before Saturday’s Arizona-UCLA kickoff, GameDay will be live on the UA mall.

“It’s cool,” said UA junior nose tackle Sani Fuimaono. “It’s what I used to wake up to watch when I was in high school.”

GameDay goes beyond cool. What’s a good word? Nirvana. It’s got to have a little music to it.

GameDay used to be snooty. It used to be Alabama-Auburn and Nebraska-Notre Dame, and an excessive diet of Wolverines, Volunteers and Buckeyes.

But over the last 15 years, GameDay has become monument to all the people of college football. It has given us Harvard-Penn, Army-Navy, Southern-Grambling and, believe it or not, North Dakota State-Incarnate Word.

The NDSU Bison hosted GameDay twice. That’s one more time than Arizona State, whose lone appearance as a host was in 2005. (The Sun Devils lost to No. 1 USC, 38-28).

“It’s gonna be big,” Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez said Monday. “I’m tickled to death they are here.”

GameDay was once the center of all “East coast bias” in college sports. Its first 24 locations were so far from the Pac-12 that when it finally erected a stage for the November 1998 Oregon-at-UCLA game — its first game at a Pac-12 venue — that the crew looked around Pasadena and realized “hey, this is where they play the Rose Bowl!”

But until Pete Carroll turned USC into a powerhouse, GameDay went 49 consecutive shows, from early 2001 to late 2004 — without a Pac-12 host.

All of that has changed. USC has since been host to 10 GameDay shows; Oregon eight.

Arizona and Stanford have twice been hosts. No other Pac-12 school has had more than one hosting role; Washington State and Cal have none.

“Just to show off our campus and the city of Tucson; it’s all positive,” RichRod said.

ESPN won’t divulge the identity of GameDay’s much-anticipated “guest picker” until Saturday.

In 2009, when Arizona lost 44-41 to Oregon in its Tucson GameDay debut, the guest picker was Olympic swimming gold medalist Amanda Beard. She was underwhelming, to put it politely.

Perhaps this time GameDay will fly Arizona alumnus Bob Baffert in from a California race track. Or maybe Steve Kerr can squeeze in a visit before the Golden State Warriors open training camp. They would fit nicely with the list of guest-picking celebrities that have ranged from Ken Griffey Jr., father of UA receiver Trey Griffey to Alice Cooper and Bubba Watson.

The appeal of GameDay is now part of America’s football fabric. This is Year 23, but ESPN didn’t always have such a willing audience.

When ESPN decided to televise the 100th meeting between Division III football rivals Amherst and Williams, the Lord Jeffs against the Ephs, the Amherst administration of 1985 balked.

They left the decision to football coach Jim Ostendarp, who famously said “we’re in the education business, not the entertainment business.”

You almost expected a poetry reading.

Twenty-two years later, the Ephs and Lord Jeffs met again, a showdown for the 2007 Little Three championship, and when ESPN’s GameDay crew erected a stage three days in advance, the population of Williamstown grew and grew and grew, from 2,500 to almost 14,000.

People camped on every available plot of grass near the Massachusetts-Vermont border.

When the ESPN people flipped the switch early Saturday morning, downtown Williamstown was transformed into a mobile fraternity party. Dozens of people dressed in purple cow costumes (the Eph mascot is a purple cow). Others held signs that said “FEAR THE COW” and “AMWORST MUST GO.”

On Saturday morning at the UA mall, scores of bleary-eyed Wildcat fans will sway behind the GameDay stage. If you’re going to be part of the crowd, jot down these words and put them on a red and blue sign:

PLEASE COME BACK

ESPN News

The original wildcat mascot arrived on campus October 17, 1915, and was introduced to the student body the following day at assembly in Herring Hall.

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America's Golden Girls - World Cup Champion USA Soccer Team

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It had been sixteen years since the women's soccer team last won the World Cup in Women's Soccer.  Long gone were the memories of that 1999 group who produced the second World Cup championship for the USA.

Here in America we are not only used to winning, we expect to win, practically any kind of sports competition.  Yet soccer or football, one of the most popular sports in the world, always struggled to get a foothold in America.

No doubt, the American brand of football, not to be confused with soccer or football everywhere else, never gave the other football a chance here in the colonies.  While American football became one of the most popular contact sports in history, and one of the richest in terms of the money it could generate, soccer remained far in the background.

Of course, it did not help that the USA men's soccer team has never achieved the fame of their women's counterpart.  In fact the only time in history the men's team reached the semi-finals of the World Cup was way back in 1930, eighty-five years ago.

Brandi-Chastain-Womens-World-Cup-July-10-1999

So, the women had to carry the burden of success to keep soccer alive in the USA.  There are professional leagues but they seldom draw major crowds and certainly do not draw major investment. Only winning can do that, thus people paid attention when the women won the first World Cup in women's soccer back in 1991.

Mia Hamm - Superstar

In 1999 they won their second World Cup powered by Mia Hamm and throughout the relatively young history of women in the World Cup the USA women have consistently been one of the top three teams in the world.

This year the team is much more media savvy, much more physical, and got stronger in every match until meeting Japan in the finals just like the last World Cup in 2011 when Japan won on penalty kicks.  This year they never had a chance as four American goals in the first sixteen minutes sealed the eventual American 5-2 victory.

In addition to drawing record TV audiences in their victory drive, the Women's team became the first female team in our history given a ticker tape parade through downtown Manhattan.  It was a fitting tribute followed by an Espy award for the best team in sports.

Thank you for reigniting American pride and taking the negative news out of our lives for a time.

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