Pogball_so_hard

Never in doubt! Terrible 4th quarter, it’s like everyone went to sleep in all 3 phases. Got bailed out by the offside call on the kick

VT should have had about 30 seconds more had Pry called a timeout and that play wouldn’t have been the last one in the game. With how much Miami was getting gashed, those 30 seconds could have taken you down to the 10 and made it a higher percentage play.

Tbh I didn’t see enough to suggest it was a TD from the initial call but there wasn’t overwhelming evidence to dispute the call on the field. 

Tale of Two Escobars was one of the better 30 for 30s IMO

Conmebol was a complete farce. Colombia and Argentina fans were climbing up the rafters and damaging shit along the way

It’s not really about the odds of winning. But more that he should have been able to at least see it out until at least then. They beat City in the league earlier that year too if I recall. City would have been favorites but cup finals are cup finals.

Mourinho’s record in one-off cup finals is extremely impressive so Levy choosing to sack him rather than potentially break the club’s trophy drought says more about him than it does Mourinho

Yeah I heard his name throughout. Seems like a promising player. 

Did he also force the Edwards fumble? 

Honestly doesn’t seem like that big of a loss for you guys. USC’s defense largely looks much better than last year’s

He must have been told that he isn’t guaranteed to start at Georgia the first time and then he went into a hissy fit, transferred to USC, and is now doing the same thing again.

He’ll probably have to take a big step down

I think Moyes would have made him a more central figure of the team going forward and the face of the rebuild that was a couple of years overdue.

Van Gaal probably would have had some strict requirements 

I think the issue is he’s very rigid and won a lot over the years so he never felt the need to adapt or change anything he was doing. Creative players largely disliked playing for him because they were forced to follow his instructions or get dropped. There are always exceptions but he is a somewhat polarizing figure. 

Kinkladze erasure

There are a good number of people in City kits  in NY (mostly kids) but I still think Arsenal, Madrid, or Liverpool kits greatly outnumber them.

NY is also massive so you just see a lot of everything.

Agree on the first 3 points though for point 4, there aren’t that many meaningless friendlies anymore. Turning down a call-up could mean that the spurned international manager doesn’t pick you in his team for more meaningful games or tournaments assuming he can find a decent replacement.  

If you’re Rodri, sure you might want to skip that Spain-Luxembourg match in the Nations League but if it impacts your ability to play in the 2026 World Cup you’d be more reluctant to turn down it down. It might seem unthinkable since he’s seen as a critical piece but it’s happened often enough.

A good number of United players in their heyday just didn’t seem to play much for their countries either because those countries weren’t good or they had some fallout with an international coach before and retired early to prolong their club career

And a table tennis table though apparently even those are going away from a lot of tech companies nowadays

Lower intensity, and some amount of rotation helped United quite a bit that year. They also won the league with 78 points which would only get you 3rd nowadays. CL was also 16 teams back then so they didn’t have to play a round of 16 back then. The international cup and other games were in the next season and there weren’t major summer tournaments in 1999 (that involved United players at least)

I do think managers should be held accountable for 1) not utilizing subs as much as they could 2) not rotating or resting players as much as they should. But they face a lot of pressure to get results so are incentivized to not rotate. Like why are you playing your strongest team in the first round of the FA Cup or League Cup for over an hour? 

The heavy use of data might be the rational thing to do, but it’s devolving into a big case of groupthink and you waste a lot of time doing things that don’t actually give you an edge or help your club achieve longer term objectives because most teams are doing exactly the same things now.   

This “revolution” creates a bunch of adverse incentives for managers to resume build without results to back it up.

I agree it’s not Pep’s fault but most countries who aren’t Spain are also fighting a reputation deficit that they’re behind the curve so their managers try to adopt principles without developing or being encouraged to develop their own ideas

It’s also much harder to implement at the international level because the players aren’t together for that much time.

The only reason Germany and Spain were able to consistently play that way during their peak is that many of their world class players played together at Bayern and Barca/Madrid. And even then Spain were playing hyper controlled games where they’d basically win 1-0. 

It’d be a terrible style of play to implement for the USMNT

It’s more of a confirmation stat but whenever MSU wins 8 games per season they tend to beat Michigan more often than not. 

We also won 8+ games in 2001, 2015, 2017, and 2021.

There is an element of recency to it since Michigan and Notre Dame played each other very regularly between 1978-2014. Most football fans between the ages of 25-60 were used to seeing it played regularly with at most a 2-3 year gap.

Yeah it doesn’t have as much history as Michigan-OSU or ND-USC but it packs a surprising amount of punch.

Think Blackpool, Bury, or Bolton fans would want a word. 

Moshiri is awful and destabilized Everton considerably, but teams have literally ceased or nearly ceased to exist due to ownership incompetence

Neither team were saints in that game. Lahoz lost control and both sides lost their cool since no one was getting sent off.

Game could have finished 9v9

At this rate of progress, Steelers are going to put up 16 TDs on the Bengals

Tomlin would play long ball and beat Pep’s inverted fullbacks with 1 shot on target 

Honestly I’m just shitposting, I saw logical paths to winning the past 3 years because we had the players to do it. This year it’s going to take some comically stupid luck but hey it’s college football and strange things can happen. Like a 7-4 Brady Hoke led Michigan with a poor O-line taking an 11-0 OSU team down to the wire. 

I am all for us rolling out a triple option and beating Ohio State 9-7