Not an original thought, I’m sure, but original to me. The best way to explain English soccer to somebody back in the U.S., who almost certainly doesn’t really care about the Premier League … is to compare it to college football. The same sort of tribal, DNA-encoded madness.

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This is the worst yet. Most of the first four years here in the UAE, we were able to see some college football. We had access to ESPN and ESPN America, which showed a bit of the college game.  Pretty much all the games that ran on ESPN in the U.S., and it was a […]

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A person leaves town … switches states .. crosses an ocean … and eventually his sports preferences morph. It’s one of those things that you don’t realize until you do a sort of internal check. “Which teams’ results do I follow? Which have I stopped tracking? Which teams can make me feel a little better […]

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For the first two decades of my journalism career, January 1 was the zenith of college football. The Biggest Day. The Longest Day. And we planned coverage of New Year’s Day football in great detail, and needed enormous sections to display everything that happened. Four or five or six bowl games, including all of the […]

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The Rams moved to St. Louis and became dead to me. Never appreciated the Raiders gangsta thing, and then they went back to Oakland. The Dodgers fell under the spell of the necromancer Frank McCourt. Never was an Angels guy. (I still consider them the Johnny-come-latelies who play 10-man ball.) Don’t care about hockey. Major […]

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When the Al Wasl club of Dubai and the UAE Pro League announced in June that they had hired Diego Maradona to be their coach … I wrote that “this will not be dull.” Got that one right. But that was shooting fish in a barrel. El Diego, FIFA’s co-player of the century (with Pele), […]

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To “sort out” is Brit-speak, and it commonly is used when referring to soccer and describes the process by which good defenses deal with attacking players. It implies a sort of impudent coming forward of small men with high-skill … for whom the antidote is a few hard men of limited finesse but grim countenance, […]

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It has been a rough, oh, coupla-three decades for Long Beach State alumni who care about the major sports. The football program was killed, and the basketball program, which was one of the nation’s best for a half-dozen seasons straddling 1970, generally wasn’t very good. So, as a 49ers alumnus, I was quite pleased to […]

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Going on 17 months now that we have been out of California — and out of the United States. I feel as if I have kept fairly good track of several American sports. Others, however, I hardly realize I haven’t been paying any attention until I blunder into some online story and realize that I […]

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I wrote about the BCS championship game for the Monday editions of The National. Keep in mind, probably 90 percent of our readers are unclear on the concept of American football … never mind college football … not to mention the states of Oregon and Alabama. (How many Americans know where Sussex is? Or the […]

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