On a late summer night in St. Paul, America… and indeed Mexico as well, were reacquainted with what we might call…

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As to avoid retaliation from any men currently serving as the head coach of a professional soccer team located in a medium-sized city in the Great Plains region of the United States of America, any and all references to which specific professional soccer team in which medium-sized city in the Great Plains region of the United States of America I would theoretically in this hypothetical dream world I’m creating for the purpose of this blog post be finding a new coach for have been redacted. This is again a thing I’m thinking about for no reason and with no intent of my own and nobody currently coaching a professional soccer team located in a medium-sized city in the great plains should have any reason to believe I’m talking about replacing them or to come beat me up. All of this is good fun had on my little blog.

Probably the Most Obvious Ones:

Kerry Zavagnin (Assistant, Sporting Kansas City)

Zavagnin during his playing days for a professional team

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College sports conferences don’t make any sense any damn more. Texas and Oklahoma are gonna play South Carolina and Vanderbilt every year, UCLA and USC are joining the damn Big Ten, which means they’ll play Big Ten schools Rutgers and Maryland, Kansas and Kansas State will not play Nebraska or Missouri anymore but might get Colorado back and will definitely get UCF and BYU in the near future, The best golfer is a black guy, the best rapper is a white guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named “Bush”, “Dick”, and “Colon.” Need I say more?

Sorry. When I get going it’s hard for me to stop. But there must be a reckoning – and this one can’t come out of Athens, Georgia. We all understand why it is this way, I’ve had midwits on Reddit tell me over and over again that it’s about money, as if any of us were under any different impression. It’s Fox, it’s Disney, it’s a desire for a consolidated television product that guarantees marquee games each week – and while that is all well and good for Lincoln Riley and whatever the name of the guy who coaches UCLA at the moment, and it’s been providing dividend after dividend for the power football programs in my native Kansas City area – We Kansas fans love our Big XII doormat status and look forward to our away games in Utah, and the Missouri fans love the slow recognition that their primary value in the SEC has shifted from “Will get the SEC network on to cable packages in St. Louis” to “Tomato Can for the actual power SEC teams.” – It is completely senseless for basically everyone else.

What of the non-revenue olympic sports? The football programs understand that they have to go play at the Bounce House in Orlando because it’s the only way we at Kansas and Kansas State can keep our collective College Football Playoff aspirations alive. But what of the talented tennis player from Great Bend who gets a scholarship to K-State with no intention of playing professionally, why should they have to go to Provo? Why should they need to take hours-long airplane voyages to Ohio and West Virginia? What of the collective collegiate spirit of the Kansas City metropolitan area? Shouldn’t those matter just as well?

I’m daring to say yes, they do matter, and I, along with my business partner Mike, with whom I had the idea driving in my car the other day, have a solution:

Introducing: The Tank 7 Collegiate Athletics Conference

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And not even one of the ones that people know about, either. I’m screaming into the void for this one, I recognize – But, boy am I screaming.

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A few months ago, in preparation for the Super Bowl, I took a look at the many wonderful pieces of football-related memorabilia available on ShopGoodwill.com. This was among the easier posts I’ve ever written, as I merely had to take a favorite pastime of mine (looking at ShopGoodwill.com) and combine it with another pastime of mine (writing a paragraph of jokes about something) to create it. The only thing that could’ve made it easier would have been if the memorabilia had been about my favorite sport, which the NFL is not. My favorite sport is street luge. However there’s not much – actually not any – street luge memorabilia available on ShopGoodwill.com right now, if you can believe it. There is some for the sport I prefer to American Football by a fine margin: Soccer.

The Soccer memorabilia category is a little shallower than its American Football counterpart, which I expected – But there’s still some good stuff floating around the ShopGoodwill ecosystem.

BRINE Pink Soccer Ball SZ 3 SIGNED –

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I must admit that I was fascinated by the news involving Netflix over the past few weeks – A loss of 200,000 subscribers, potentially more by the mid-summer, price increases, an ad-supported subscription tier, and a bevy of shows canceled. But I was more fascinated by another streaming service’s struggles: The outright shutting down of CNN+ only a month after its launch.

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I categorized what Seattle’s had unique success with in four categories – Financial ambition, competitive ambition, community significance, and club history. While some MLS franchises have hit on some of these, nobody has hit on all four the way that Seattle has, and in the future some degree of hitting on all four should be what Major League Soccer franchises strive for if they intend to emulate the success of the Seattle Sounders. I will break down what these aspects may look like in the near future and connect them to teams I feel are currently doing well in these regards, and which need some work.

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I should qualify that Seattle is a unique Major League Soccer team. To quote the rhetorician Scott Steiner – “They’re a genetic freak, and they’re not normal.”

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This is the first in a three part series of posts about the Seattle Sounders’ win over Pumas UNAM in the Concacaf Champions League final last Wednesday. Seattle is the first MLS team to win Concacaf since 2000, and the first ever to do it in the Champions League format. This first part covers what it means for a Major League Soccer team to win it in a historical context, the second will cover Seattle’s relative uniqueness as a MLS team, and the third will cover what other MLS teams can do in the future to emulate the Sounders’ success.

What struck me about Seattle winning the Concacaf Champions League final on Wednesday night was how dramatic it wasn’t. I can’t say I personally had any fantastic visions of what it was going to look like when a Major League Soccer team finally got over the hump of winning the Concacaf Champions League, but I just figured it’d be more difficult for that theoretical team than it turned out to be for the actual Sounders team that dominated Pumas 3-0 on Wednesday. 

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I was taken aback – I think awestruck, honestly, though in a very minor way, as much as awe can strike you through a computer screen – by the scenery of this US Open Cup third round match between second division Birmingham Legion and third division South Georgia Tormenta on Tuesday night.

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