USA plays down national sports teams

Young, scrappy, a little too inexperienced, this is how the U.S. national basketball team has been described as it competes in the FIBA World Basketball Championships in Turkey. The team, comprised of the NBA's second tier of superstars, has been portrayed as a slight favorite by media pundits around the country, a team from which greatness is not expected but will be appreciated. In corporate lingo, this is known as "managing expectations," setting the bar a little lower than need be so you don't look bad if perfection is not achieved and look a whole lot better if it is. There's nothing new about the practice, but this summer in particular it's become a fascination of the sports media in its descriptions of U.S. national teams.

For instance, the World Cup saw the "underdog" U.S. team achieve moral victories even when it drew against England and Slovenia, and show incredible character and heart in achieving what little it did. So a defeat versus Ghana in the second round, although somewhat disappointing, did not detract from the otherwise "great effort" put forth by the team throughout the tournament. It's a storyline we all heard and accepted outright. After all, soccer is not the predominant sport in the U.S. as it is everywhere else so how could we expect greatness from a "young and inexperienced" group on the world stage, right? Well, not really.

While it's true that U.S. soccer is not a global powerhouse, it's slightly silly to promote any story which pits the U.S. as anything but a total and absolute favorite against Slovenia, Algeria and Ghana. On the surface many might disagree but that's because U.S. fans don't see their team the same way the rest of the world does. For example, when the U.S. played Slovenia, many saw it as a game between two evenly matched sides. Nobody stepped back and thought that here was a match between the richest and third largest country on Earth against a country whose population is 150 times smaller, 2.06 million, roughly two-thirds the size of the San Diego metro area.

With size come all the other advantages which we yet again don't think about. Advantages such as funding, superior and more varied training facilities, equipment and medical facilities, not to mention of course the more varied and extensive pool of talent to choose from. Again critics would say that the professional league here is of a worse caliber than in the rest of the world and while that's true in most cases comparing it, to the Slovenian, Algerian or Ghanaian leagues is a joke.

Nevertheless, the "underdog" story persists throughout all U.S. sports, not only soccer. The results have been most visible at the FIBA World Championships this past week. Team USA's close wins haven't been "disappointing" but rather "learning experiences" and blowouts have been a "demonstration of their potential." The team, which features the NBA's leading scorer from the 2009-2010 season, Kevin Durant, who led the league with 30.1 points per game, and what some journalists have called "fringe all-stars," whatever that means, has become quite the enigma. Observers know full well that they cannot look at the team and call them underdogs, especially since it features more all-stars (3 in 2010) from the world's greatest league than all the other teams combined (0 in 2010). Instead, they have had to be creative and have thus replaced descriptions of superior athleticism, strength and power with new buzz words like "scrappy" and "tenacious."

The only examples I can think of where the national consciousness has allowed itself to expect total domination in national team sports are when the results are almost guaranteed. For instance that was the case with the 1992 Dream Team and just about anytime Michael Phelps and his teammates enter a pool. In situations such as those, fans expect not only dominance but total annihilation with multiple records being broken.

The U.S. sports media has made their national teams into that guy you hate playing against at the gym. When he knows he's got the best team he'll talk trash the whole day and keep beating up on you, but when he fears it's going to be in the least bit competitive then suddenly you start hearing excuses about sprained ankles and muscles that were pulled last week. It's demeaning, pathetic and really just annoying. Everybody knows you're the best don't pretend like it isn't true, rather expect and demand it every time and if you get beat then you got beat, but don't start faulting that ankle again.