Avoiding the Drop

Click Here to Nominate Us!

Those of you that follow us on Twitter (you are doing that, right?) probably got the news a few nights back that we’re tentatively begging for requesting nominations for U.S. Soccer’s “Best U.S. Soccer Blog of 2009″ award. We’re doing this for two reasons:

1. Generally speaking, the best stuff that we’ve done over the eight months since we’ve started has related back to MLS, the U.S. Men’s National Team, or the general culture of soccer in the U.S. You might come for the Massimo Busacca pedophile jokes, but you’re coming back for the Conor Casey Appreciation Society updates.
2. Personally speaking, I want to be nominated for an award so that my wife will maybe stop rolling her eyes when I show her our readership stats. Long shot? Yes…but don’t kill a dream.

We’re not expecting you to do this for no reason whatsoever, however. After the jump, we’re going to revisit the very best of the last eight months of coverage on U.S. soccer, both as a testament to the time we’ve spent covering the American game and as a reminder that anyone with a lax workplace internet policy can be nominated for an award. Join us, won’t you?

After perusing the archives (harder than it seems, since we apparently didn’t believe in tagging posts when we first started out), here are the best stories U.S. stories we’ve got to show for our efforts.

• Signaling our intention to whine about MLS for eight straight months put the American league at the forefront of our coverage, one of our first pieces ever on the site was an MLS Roundtable back in February. Bonus: at the end of that piece are our predictions for the upcoming season, where Adam (then known by his superhero name, Sex Fabregas) and I predict a big season for…Juan Pablo Ángel.
• Even with the awkward pun of a  title, the gridiron reference, and the misidentification of “Atlante” as “Atalanta”, this is still more CONCACAF Champions League coverage…than we’d done up to that point.
• Resident New England Revolution fan thefuseproject followed that up with an analysis of Christopher Sullivan’s announcing style. We’re not afraid of the big stories here, folks!
• As part of our continued desire to create more readers grow the game’s popularity, we started the popular “First Timers” series (which is on hiatus mostly because we forgot we were doing it). This column is awesome on two fronts: one, it’s interesting to read ruminations on the game from someone not familiar with it, and two, none of us actually have to write it. That’s a blogging double whammy, folks. The highlight of that piece was probably when religion professor Stephen H. Webb, who’d previously slated the entire sport, actually sat down and watched a match for us…and liked it!
• We then engaged in a little bit of baseless rumor mongering (we’re a blog; we can do that).
• Our next big American soccer story of note was thefuseproject’s post on the Women’s Professional Soccer league, the ideas behind it, and the reasons it might not work out. The piece is notable for managing to do this without making any “Boxx and Cox” jokes, which is how you know I didn’t write it.
• Admittedly, not much happened in May (we were on a European vacation, so to speak). Still, thefuseproject managed to crank out a piece on the Philadelphia Union, their logo, and why they should’ve been called Union Philadelphia (we’re big on semantics here).
• This post is notable for two things: it kicked off the “All U.S. Men, All the Time” month that June ended up being, and for some reason I stuck up for Brian Ching in the comments. Actually, that might be a mark against our blog…but we did a really sweet roundtable later that week that probably maybe makes up for it.
• We spent the summer watching as Bob Bradley went from chopping block to luckiest man ever to patron saint of U.S. soccer to decent manager before he squandered all of the goodwill he’d earned by scraping his way into the World Cup.
• We explained the Designated Player rule to you (and, more importantly, to ourselves).
• We reviewed that Beckham book (and then wrote pretty much exactly the same piece two months later and called it a “follow-up”).
• We wrote a second WPS piece…which means our total WPS stories outnumber the number of WPS matches I watched by one and a half.
• We watched with you in terror as Bob Bradley’s squads for four World Cup Qualifiers almost screwed the whole thing up.
• And finally, in what I think might be some of this blog’s finest moments: we warned you of the dangers that Conor Casey poses to the U.S. men’s team, then rewrote the article to emphasize the problems, and then begrudgingly apologized when he scored a brace in Honduras.

Sure, there’s been a lot of English and European stuff (not so much South America, because, well, we’ve gotta draw a line somewhere). I think, however, that at the end of the day we’re at least a fun read, if not always necessarily as insightful as some other blogs. We don’t get to interview Brad Guzan, we don’t do a fancy podcast, and I’m pretty sure we’ve never delved into college soccer. We don’t think we should win this award, and we’re not actually sure we should be nominated.

The internet, however, is a funny place. I mean, just because we probably SHOULDN’T be nominated doesn’t mean that we don’t WANT to be nominated. That’s where you readers come in. We have an easy request: make us your Rory Fitzpatrick. Vote us in even if we don’t deserve it. We’re good for it. We’ll make it up to you somehow, and you’ll have the peace of mind that you helped the cause.

Maybe we’ll even give you a star…?