If you have any reasonable level of motivation on Friday, you're a better person than I. I spent about half the time I usually do trying to find interesting links for today's edition of whatever-the-hell-this-is-called-now, but still managed to scrounge up a few.

• First, Penn State soccer players are excited about the Philadelphia Union. Maybe. Again, we have an example of a college soccer player admitting he doesn't pay much attention to MLS; that bugs me, a lot, but at least he's willing to give it a shot thanks to the Union starting up in 2010.

• MLS has a female official, and she's a former speed-skating Canadian. Seems weird, especially since I wasn't aware that MLS had a female official, but maybe that just proves the point that it doesn't matter. Besides, if she works for MLS, she has to be terrible.

• An "on this day in history" note: On November 6, 1869, Rutgers and Princeton played the first ever intercollegiate football game in the United States. The sport they were playing was probably a bit soccer and a bit rugby, since they didn't yet seem to know what exactly the rules were back then. The English FA had only codified the first set of established laws of the game (which were still not universally accepted) in 1863, and the Yanks, as usual, did their own thing. The game between Rutgers and Princeton surely looked more like soccer than it did American football, but it doesn't really matter; intercollegiate "football" turned more towards rugby and then diverged further with the rules largly drawn up by Walter Camp in the late 19th century. It's impossible to know where the US would be as a soccer nation if the rules adopted were those of association football instead, but I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be worried about soccer "catching on".

Deep Cuts, also known as Shallow Scratches, appears as daily as is possible and brings together stories relating to American Soccer from around the web. If you have a link for Shallow Scratches/Deep Cuts, feel free to email it to matchfitusa@gmail.com.