Checking in on the Vegas National Championship odds

The USMNT got absolutely boat raced by Belgium the other night.

There’s a lot of chatter about it online, but I already said everything we all normally argue over after the men’s team gets whooped by a European squad at some point in the tournament before the opener against Paraguay.

I promise you there’s a class of football players who maxed out at a level lower than “USMNT” in the world of football who would have made a stronger soccer team for America than what we have today if our culture wasn’t so overwhelmingly enthusiastic about America’s War Game rather than futbol. There’s also baseball, taking another massive bite out of the pie.

When it comes down to it, even if I was fully convinced that the only great option for my son to maximize his athletic potential was some sort of intensive select soccer path…that’d still be a tough sell rather than just settling for a modest role in the football machine.

Better athletes than the Boyds have been making the same calculation for generations now…so don’t get your hopes too high for this World Cup run. As a nation we really only care every four years or so, and not fully even then.

Ethan Strauss just wrote about it as well and had a more precise version of my same argument. Namely, that in America we don’t have soccer-obsessive dads funneling their sons into the sport with key oversight. That’s truly it and what I was trying to capture in my comparison of rec league soccer and Pop Warner football.

But since I know all of you care more about football than futbol anyways, let’s move on to something more fun.

Let’s look at the current Vegas odds for the college football National Championship and weigh it against each program’s status at my two most important positions of outside receiver and defensive tackle.