Mid-Afternoon Dawg Bites: Soccer Karma, David Greene, and How We Could be Heroes Just for One Game

In most countries around the world, the professional soccer clubs have their own academies, where kids with promising young talent (frequently from disadvantaged circumstances) spend hours every day playing soccer while being tutored in the academy’s private school. (These academies operate “free” to the participants because the clubs that run the academies own the professional rights to the kids from their academies.)

In the USA, however, the “best” very young talent is culled from competition teams and traveling squads which are usually comprised of middle-to-upper-class children, because the kids participating in the squads have to pay their own way to all the competitions, etc. Kids who can’t afford the traveling circus, if they stay with soccer at all, don’t get “discovered” until they play in high school or, sometimes, in college.

There is also a disconnect between colleges and the “traveling circus” teams, because the circus teams have a reputation as the “best and brightest,” while most college programs have developed reputations as killers of creativity and not just poor talent developers, but actual talent-killers. (This is because of a perception, not altogether unfounded, that college coaches aren’t concerned with building a players talent for the next level, just with winning as many games as they can in college so they keep their job.)

I’m sure that I’m brushing over some of the finer nuances of the differences in the American youth game vs. the rest of the world, and to be honest, I have absolutely no idea how one would use that difference to our advantage. Klinsmann seems to have a plan, though… and that’s a very good thing.

and been Americanized. I’m curious what’s unique about our soccer landscape.

Although it would be gracious of us to agree to play Vanderbilt in Nashville two years in a row, every SEC team plays four conference home games and four conference road games every year. (We don’t think of it that way, because one of our games is a neutral site game, but we have three conference games in Sanford Stadium in the years we wear red jerseys in Jacksonville, and we have four conference games in Sanford Stadium in the years we wear white jerseys in Jacksonville. It may be purely symbolic, but it still counts.)

This year, Vanderbilt hosts Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Ole Miss in Nashville and plays Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee on the road. If the Commodores suddenly started playing the Bulldogs on the road in odd-numbered years and at home in even-numbered years, instead of the other way around, some other annual Vandy series would have to be flip-flopped to accommodate that change. Please also note that Vanderbilt plays Georgia at home in the years the Commies face the Gamecocks, the Gators, and the Volunteers on the road. Asking Vandy to start playing Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee on the road every odd-numbered autumn would be more than a little bit of a burden.

Basically, you can’t shift just one series; you’d have to switch a bunch of them. I don’t like making back-to-back trips to the Volunteer State, either, but it’s not as simple as making one swap. A lot of moving parts, affecting multiple teams, would be involved, and I’d much rather focus on a guaranteed open date before the Florida game every other year than expend political capital on this.

. . . a sorority sister?

. . . and, since the Red and Black were the Crackers before they were the Bulldogs, the historical nature of the nomenclature ought to render it socially acceptable.

At what point may I move that we adopt the gentleman’s proposal by acclamation?