Losing badly at football to a country that has the overall population of Florida isn't all that surprising to me. The USA likes to talk about how our football of the soccer variety program is improving over the years but when you take the youthful members of your national team because you have to be under 23 to participate and get absolutely decimated by a very small and rather poor country, I think you can say that perhaps the USA's football program isn't progressing as well as they would like.
I didn't watch a great deal of the game because well, I don't really care about the Olympics other than the 5 on 5 basketball, but I did see the 2nd half of this and it was just shocking how out-classed and out-gunned the Yanks were in this one. When you play a small country like Morocco you like to think that a country that has 15 times their population and dramatically more financial resources that they would do a lot better than 4-0 loss. It wasn't just that though, the Americans were getting beaten in almost all aspects of the game.
I don't really know what the Americans could have done differently because they kind of devolved into chaos later on in the game and were simply playing a "long ball game" that very rarely works. Any time they got the midfield things just descended into chaos and the Americans quickly lost possession. This changed a bit in the first part of the 2nd half when the USA put up 3 shots on goal in the first 10 minutes. In the entire first half, team USA only managed one shot on goal total.
It's never surprising to me when the USA loses in international games because I don't think that they are one of the best teams in the world and likely never will be. They enjoy a ranking in the top 20 only because the spend most of the year playing shitty Caribbean teams and impoverished central American nations. So when I see them ranked near the top 10 and realize that this is based almost exclusively on W/L ratios, I know that it is full of poo poo.
So losing that was upsetting but not at all surprising. I would have liked to see the Americans get into the semi-finals but they would have gotten rocked there by Spain, the reigning European champions anyway.
What did surprise me was how poorly the United States is doing at 3 on 3 basketball in the Olympics.
I didn't watch any of the games because I don't consider this to be a real sport, but I was a bit alarmed to find out the level of domination that USA sees in regular and real basketball doesn't exist on the 3 on 3 format at all. They are getting beaten quite badly by almost everyone that they face. Don't expect many familiar faces on the court here because they aren't there. If these guys and girls are in the NBA and WNBA I certainly don't recognize them.
Looking in at the men's side of things, only one of these guys ever played in the NBA and did very little actual playing. They have played overseas in rather unknown leagues but nobody really amounted to much. I wonder why the NBA players are shunning this event? The women are a mix of pros in the WNBA and people who I guess couldn't hack it in the pros and instead do FIBA events only.
Even if they couldn't hack it in the pros though, to get not just beaten but embarrassed by their opposition in this sport is pretty strange.
When you hear that USA (men or women) are going to play Latvia, Lithuania, Australia, and Spain in basketball I think without knowing anything about it other than the country of origin that the "smart money" would be to bet on USA.. This has not been the case at all as USA men or women, have only managed a single win in all of these matchups. I guess the pros just aren't interested or that would certainly seem the case.
I haven't been watching this because I don't like the half-court pickup style of game. This seems like streetball to me and shouldn't be an Olympic sport. This is only the 2nd time that it has been a game at the Olympics and if I had my way, it would be the last. I'm not terribly patriotic but I guess we just need to stick to watching gymnastics and swimming events if we want to see the Stars and Bars raised at the end.