In the U.S., soccer is for kids. Over here soccer means orange slices at halftime and colorful beribboned scrunchies on golden ponytails. The attempts to build up a pro soccer league have been hampered by the fact that in the U.S., talented soccer players go on to play football, basketball, and baseball teams, which have a higher profile and better funding at the college level. Any would-be goalkeepers are playing shortstop. Anybody with good feet is a running back. So pro soccer players in the US are B-list athletes, and that makes the game boring. America hasn’t had a David Beckham because instead we have Magic Johnson, Joe Montana, Willie Mays, and Brian Leetch.

Soccer is also generally thought of in America as a sport for crybabies, masochists, and psychotic knife-wielding Scottish people. (Thank you, Saturday Night Live.) And the reputation isn’t undeserved; people routinely shank each other over the outcome of fútbol matches in Latin America, and even those oh-so-civilized European fans frequently come up in the news after beating each other up in bars. Americans get spirited about sports and have refined trash-talking to an art form, but with the exception of certain parts of Boston and Chicago, fistfighting is frowned on, and the idiots who trash their city’s downtown after winning a championship tend to be gangbangers looking for an excuse, not sports fans.

And then there’s the players! Professional soccer players must spend half of their training time on the set of a Mexican télenovela. If you can’t fall down, scream, cry, hug your legs, and roll around and whine begging for a penalty. When American teams do this, even the Wall Street Journal makes fun of them. American sports fans are merciless when it comes to crybabies. Whine, and your opponents will mock you, and your fans will tell you to suck it up or suffer the consequences.

Probably the biggest thing to overcome is that soccer lives in the stone age when it comes to technology. Videography at the World Cup, to use the technical term, looks like ca-ca. The NFL provides lush HD coverage, cool animations, computer graphics to help demonstrate how a previous play went, and flying overhead cams. This stuff counts, and the austere, unpolished pitches on ESPN3 don’t impress eyes used to some flair. Even basketball uses several cameras, including Steadicams and rim cams. A world cup match uses film techniques that the NBA abandoned in the 1980′s, and the commentators usually sound like two bored British guys. Oh, wait.

The Super Bowl, the crowning glory of American sporting events, provides a lush mythology complete with commercials, cheerleaders, halftime shows, and special effects at the end of the game. The World Cup offered us . . . the vuvuzela, a device that makes a sound similar to if you fitted a cat’s rear end with an air compressor and blew the air backwards through its digestive system.

The biggest piece of missing tech from pro soccer is use of sensors and video cameras to compensate for the fact that referees seem too busy arguing with crybaby players to pay attention to what happens in the match. As I type this, England is losing to Germany, likely because of the damage done to their morale when referees failed to note a ball that landed a full two feet behind Germany’s goal line. The impact of bad calls seems to be massive on players; with that much at stake, is it that difficult to do what the NHL did and install some frakkin’ sensors? Would it really destroy the game to introduce video review of controversial calls? A soccer fan told me that doing this destroys the “human element” of the game and lessens the excitement. I told him he was a masochist.

They keep saying soccer will catch on in the U.S., but I think it may have missed the boat. Even ol’ Becks couldn’t get people in LA to care, and he was supposed to be the Great British Hope for MLS. As long as scores are low, players are second-rate, officiating is questionable, and tech is outdated, the fans won’t come around. Could it change? Maybe, but not without pretty substantial shifts in culture. Until high school and college soccer gets as much attention and funding as football, the good athletes and coaches will continue to drift away to more exotic and lucrative grounds. In the meantime, all you soccer fans keep nursing those ulcers. I’ll be over here waiting to high-five someone when football season starts.

I don’t remember any of the laws except that you’re supposed to call them laws and not rules, and that I can’t help but think of them in terms of football rules. Like if you make it to the end zone you get five points and then two after points. And field goals are still worth three points. And you can’t pass forward, which is easy enough to remember because there isn’t a quarterback and running backs can’t pass forward after gaining possession anyway.

My woeful ignorance of the sport concerned me a little on Saturday morning, when I found myself at a pub at 9:30 a.m. to see the England-Wales match for the Six Nations tournament. Turned out that the place, which is owned and operated by folks from Belfast, was a little lonely for England supporters. But they didn’t appear to have poisoned our breakfast and the match was fun to watch, snarky comments from some bratty little offspring of Wales fans notwithstanding.

I realized a few minutes in that rugby would have been a lot more easy for me to understand back in college if I had actually seen a match on television before playing the game. It makes a lot more sense with a bird’s eye view. The smooth line of play, the forward progress, the reason there’s so much kicking the ball around . . . it was enlightening, ten years later, to finally understand why we were doing all of that. I compared watching rugby as an American football fan to watching a familiar movie dubbed into another language. It’s familiar enough but you have to rely on context rather than clear understanding to follow things.

Once I got the hang of the flow, I started making comparisons. There is some physical difference between individual rugby players, but not nearly as much specialization as in football. Everyone is just . . . thick. Solid muscle. No linemen with drooping guts, no finely sculpted runningbacks. The lack of padding means that there aren’t the ridiculous big hits that there are in football, which meant fewer injuries. But when there were injuries, they just left them on the field, because the clock wouldn’t stop running. I kept mentally poaching guys from both teams. “Hmm, he’d make a great tight end . . . wow that guy would be an amazing wide receiver . . . hmmm.”

But as compatible as the players are to the two game styles, there is a very key difference between football and rugby players. Football players are tough. Rugby players are scary.

They don’t leave the field just because they are bleeding profusely. They pile drive their own teammates headfirst into the grass if it means gaining yardage. When they line up for the scrum, they don’t have helmets and shoulder pads, but they crash together like rams in rutting season. And they certainly don’t wear diamond earrings, swagger as they walk, or do little dances after scoring points. If I were walking down a dark alley in a rough neighborhood, the person I would want to be walking with was any one of the guys up on that screen. The person I would not want to meet would be any one of the guys up on that screen.

England fought pretty hard, but Wales pretty much had it locked up in the first half. There was an exciting moment when England almost took the lead, which may very well have given them the momentum to put the game away. Soccer usually bores me, but I could give this rugby thing another shot. (As a viewer, not as a player, thankyouverymuch.) There’s plenty of hits and enough scoring to keep it interesting. I suppose the only thing left to figure out is how to handle the lack of commercials. Sure, it’s nice not having the game drowned out by the blaring cries of commercial interests, but when do fans have time for bathroom breaks? Or getting more beer? Or loading up on snacks? Shoot, even finding a place that’s playing it and then having to get up early to see it is an extra complication. Whew! Being a sports fan requires a lot of work!

John Madden is the 90-year-old grandpa of sportscasters who smells like pee, awkwardly kills conversation with comments that just can’t be responded to, and babbles utter nonsense that those around him are obligated to pretend are profound and insightful statements. No matter how irrelevant the factoid, no matter how painfully obvious the reflection, and no matter how idiotic the choice of words, he’s untouchable. I’m able to put up with him only because of the fact that he’s not abrasive or off-putting. He’s just kind of there. When he goes “BAR BAR DE GAR YAR” I can just kind of nod my head and go, “yeah, that’s right grampa.”

Tangent: Now Bill Walton . . . that guy pisses me off. I don’t know how many doobies Walton’s rolled at all those Grateful Dead concerts he’s been to over the years, but he certainly shouldn’t punish me with his inane gibberish that seems to pass as basketball commentary. He’s got more catch phrases than a Jim Carrey movie and makes more use of hyperbole than a teenage girl explaining how unfair it is that she just got grounded. I have actually watched entire Lakers games with the volume all the way down just to avoid hearing the sound of his voice.

Where was I? Oh yeah . . . John Madden. Yup, he’s still sitting in the electric wheelchair over in the corner babbling to himself. Or maybe recording more lines for NFL 2010. I can’t tell anymore. Anyway. Maybe it’s the fact that color commentators aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed that ultimately makes them memorable. Some people in the news are remembered for their flawless delivery, like Vin Scully, or for their homespun sincerity, like Walter Cronkite. But others . . . are just dumb as a box of rocks. But I guess we like those guys too. Maybe it’s because we love tradition. Maybe it’s because guys like Madden can make Joe Six Pack feel just a little bit smarter during the Big Game. Or maybe it’s that the only smarts he had he used up to hire some really freakin’ good lawyers to negotiate his contracts.

Ah, the mysteries of the universe.

The question has always been “what do you replace it with?” but to me that doesn’t seem such a difficult question. We already have a mechanism in place, one that relies on experts and logic and doesn’t eliminate the thrill of victory with numbers that can’t be overcome. The answer? Toss out the BCS. Do no rankings during the regular season. None. All the teams play twelve games, and good ones try to play strong schedules. After the last game, the coaches and the AP vote, considering wins and losses, strength of schedule, and all of the normal considerations. Another list rates teams from 0 to 12 based on the number of victories in the regular season. The results are collated and the top 48 teams are named.

A two round playoff ensues, leaving twelve NCAA bowl games to be played. I really don’t see much difference between a thirteen game season and a fourteen game season, especially at the caliber that the best college teams play at these days. The BCS is rigid and makes no room for the human element in the game. Individual voters may be flawed, but the broad pool of voters gives room for idiots and opinions.

It probably won’t happen — television and other commercial interests push the NCAA around in ways that bother me more and more each year, and my hopes that colleges would just flip them all the bird and go their own way are always in vain. But the BCS is so notoriously unpopular that I have to hope they’ll kick it to the curb. After two years of massive upheaval in the rankings, fans, players, coaches and critics alike have seen how arbitrary and useless a completely non-human system can be. It can destroy hopes of comebacks, underdogs, and dramatic victories, which is what makes sports fun to watch in the first place.

TCU 31
Stanford 14

Maryland 35
Cal 27

BYU 59
UCLA 0

Ohio State 3
USC 35

HAHAHAHAHA!!!

This is like heroin for USC fans. I can literally feel my body becoming weightless and transcending this earthly sphere to the blessed realms of Valhalla, where Pete Carroll eternally coaches this absolutely perfect team over and over again. I’m really not just talking hot air when I say that this USC team could hold its own agains many NFL teams. An insanely aggressive defense (tackling? how about flying missile takedowns instead?) with a lightning-fast offense left no doubt. Ohio State and USC have danced around each other for years, and finally getting to see this matchup turn into such a thorough clobbering leave the Trojans with only one threat: the possibility of complacency. But they should have learned a lesson about looking at the bowl game before the season is over from last year’s game against Stanford and especially the stupid loss to UCLA in 2006.

If I passionately cared about the NFL, I would have found Sunday’s games as upsetting as Saturday’s were intoxicating. The Vikings proved yet again that despite having one of the most talented rosters in the league, gross mismanagement by their useless coach will leave them out of the running for the playoffs. Watching that game was astounding. Adrian Peterson is the real deal; he’s a pleasure to watch and a real talent. But the Vikings’ playbook is as unsophisticated as a high school JV team’s, and twice as predictable. I saw only one trick play, and almost every first down was very predictable; handoff to Peterson and running it up the center. The fact that he was able to pull about five yards off of each carry is a testament to how talented he is, considering that there were always four defenders dogging him. While I enjoyed seeing Peyton Manning get furiously frustrated from spending half the game flat on his back, I did not enjoy watching Childress blow a solid lead with uncreative plays executed poorly by Tavaris Jackson’s mediocre leadership.

While there were some absolute rubbish calls by the officials in the Colts-Vikings game, the Vikings’ loss was their own fault. Not so much for The Chargers, who got ripped off big time. It would be awfully nice if the NFL was more open about how officials are graded on their ability to call plays and how well they swallow their pride during reviews. It’s so rare for officials to overturn a call. Human error is part of the game, which is the point of having official reviews and coaches’ challenges. But either enforce proper play reviews 100%, or do away with it altogether. I’d rather have a system where teams just have to deal with a play as it’s called in the moment than a flawed system where review does nothing to set the record straight.