Things are slow, so I'm going to be a bit ridiculous today. Read on, and bear with me...

I'm one of those people who constantly bemoans the condition of the U.S. Open Cup. I hate the way MLS teams treat Cup matches as exhibitions, often using it as an excuse to trot out a third or fourth selection team. It bothers me that the one truly historic competition that we have in this country gets treated as though it doesn't matter.

Despite the automatic bid to the CONCACAF Champions League that the tournament now provides, MLS teams still largely view the Cup as a inconvenience rather than a trophy worth winning.

All of this leads to my question, which I expect won't go over well with some...

Is it time to retire the Open Cup and move on?

The simple fact is that neither Major League Soccer itself nor the its member teams care about the Cup. Because USSF controls the competition, there's no money and no incentive for the league to promote it. USL teams play hard and show well in the tournament, but largely because it's one of the few showcases for them to show their quality against the bigger, richer, MLS.

So if neither league really cares, and the tournament is fated to languish in continued obscurity, then what's the point? The idea may be romantic, and the history may be long, but neither of those elements buy the competition relevancy.

American soccer simply doesn't have the infrastructure or cultural resonance to support a tournament on the scale of the U.S. Open Cup. As lovely as it might be to think that our cup competition could one day approach the level of England's FA Cup, we have to realistic; it's just not going to happen.

Still, we desperately need an important cup competition in this country (I envy the Canadians with the V-Cup), so something has to be done.

So this is what I propose:

A new Cup competition composed solely of MLS and USL-1 clubs, with the winner getting that "coveted" CONCACAF Champions League spot.

If those two leagues ever have a chance of getting together and agreeing on something, an event like a new "American Cup" could be just the thing to make it happen. If each organization has incentive to properly sell the thing, we might actually get somewhere. If MLS has a reason to force its teams to actually try, we might actually get somewhere.

I know that putting the U.S. Open Cup out of its misery isn't necessarily an attractive option for those of us who still think the tournament has potential; but as some point, a practical view has to be taken, and the tournament will at the least need to be revamped.

I'm babbling as it's Friday and I'm still upset over my home computing situation (luckily for both you and my sanity, the desktop isn't my own outlet for posting), so perhaps none of this makes sense. I realize that there are other concerns that I'm leaving out of my rant, like CONCACAF transferring the CL spot, USSF being just a tad upset at MLS, or the simple matter of killing off a competition with such a long history.

Any thought? Should I just get off of my soapbox and accept the status quo, or does something like what I propose actually make sense?