This reaction to the United States moving on in World Cup play despite its loss to Germany seems a little overwrought to me:
Sorry, World, but that is bullshit. And I don't even care if it helped America. It's not American style to lose but advance. We won a game, we tied a game, and then we lost a game, but still we advance. Why not just give every country in the world a "cup"? A big cup... of lameness.
Don't get me wrong. I don't care for soccer or understand its appeal -- when the World Cup over, I will not have watched a minute of it. But every sport that is capped with a champion for the year has a winnowing process to make it as sure as possible that the best teams move on. Saving the teams with the best win-lose goal differentials doesn't seem like an unreasonable way to do it. Hell, even in the NFL -- if you want to talk about something American -- because the playoffs start with having to win ones division, there can be teams with worse season records getting in at the expens of teams with better ones.
