- Jason Davis

Love him or hate him, it's hard to deny that Bill Simmons has a particular ability to tap the very soul of modern-day American sports. Sure, he spends too much time on the NBA for my liking, and he can sometimes loiter too long in the shallow end of the pop culture pool, but the man knows how to speak to sports fans.


I'm a fan of Simmons, though my rapt attention to every word he writes (and there are A LOT of them) faded a few years ago. That doesn't mean that I don't appreciate what he does or enjoy his work when I come across it; it just means that I've either outgrown Simmons' brand of sports commentary or my interests for what he covers have flagged. Likely, it's the latter.


This blog has pushed soccer firmly to the top of my sports list. There's so much to this game that it leaves little time for processing adequately what is going on elsewhere; if you had asked me five years ago if there would be a summer in which I didn't know how the Red Sox were playing at any given point, I would have laughed. Now I barely know their starting lineup.


So Simmons and I, like ships passing in the night, generally only come together when he decides to aim his overworked keyboard at soccer. He did this, just today, tackling the very subjects I spend so much of my time processing, analyzing, and debating. I won't say he does a better job of it than me (I do have an ego, after all), but influence he holds makes the things he says particularly noteworthy. It's fairly clear that Simmons is all in.


On the surface, that's a good thing. The man is uniquely positioned to give soccer a bit of credibility with the average American sports fan. He has 1.2 million Twitter followers for crying out loud. He works for the largest sports media outlet in the country, has a massive fanatic readership that constantly feeds him fodder for his Road Rules/Wrestling reference laden missives, and is the closest thing to "the voice of the fan" we have. For some of you, that's a problem. Nevertheless, it's the truth.


Good things aside, I have a bone to pick with Bill Simmons. I'm about to get a bit selfish 'round here.


I want you to like soccer, Bill, I really do. In a small way it validates my own interest that one of the country's best known writers is adopting this "foreign" sport. But I wonder, if you really jump aboard wholeheartedly, if there will be anything left for the rest of us.


Ya see, soccer is niche, even with the World Cup interest, and provides a small window for people who get it and can write a little to carve out a piece of legitimate commentary space. Too often, though I lament it, soccer gets left out of the general sports conversation in this country. When people go looking for quality opinions and cultural examinations of where soccer fits into the American psyche, I want them to come here. Yeah, I know my kingdom is small, but if the issues you're suddenly covering, ones I've made my milieu, are pumped into Google by someone newly interested, where are they going to land? Here, modest and amateur MFUSA, or Page 2 at ESPN.com, the Pacific Ocean to my tiny puddle?


And don't give me any nonsense about those people getting here eventually. That's crap. The number of people committed enough to skip ahead 5 or 10 pages to finally land on this bit of Internet turf (after they visit several other American soccer blogs who do it even better - yes, there are a couple) are few and far between. No one is going to scroll through page after page of search results to somehow finally land on my screed about soccer's whipping boy status on sportstalk radio or oddly-titled postmortem (the rules of blogging: I usually fail at them) of the American World Cup experience. The average fan is going to get your shallow observations of soccer, chuckle at the story of your son's door-slamming routine, and move on to why LeBron would be a fool to sign with New York.


It's not that you don't understand the sport; I think you probably do. I'm sure you're learning every day of the World Cup, and I know you've been following long enough to have picked up most of the basics and some of the particulars. In the long run, if I'm to continue caring about the popularity of soccer here (a concern I wish I could completely leave behind), your columns on the subject are a wonderful development. You've got sycophants reading you who will now follow Landon Donovan's career because you took an interest in him. It's unhealthy on their part (the sycophancy that is), but represents another hurdle for soccer to clear on the path to respectability.


Hell, I'll admit it. I'm jealous. Your reach is something every person writing on the Internet (including 99 percent of the pros) can only dream about. Paul Obejuerge thinks you need a rival. Success engenders resentment, and even though I try not to be a "hater" in that way, I'm not immune. You're sitting at the top of the mountain while the rest of us (and yeah, I'm speaking for all the bloggers) wallow in the muck at the bottom. With that massive pulpit you're standing on, you can easily steer people in any direction you wish. Excuse me if I don't trust you.


Screw it, I'm being petty. Let's put aside my insecurities and resentment and talk a bit about what you're going to do now.


Are you going to pimp MLS? It's soccer, and it's here, and even if it's not as glamorous as what happens in England, it's quality competition on a local level. I won't say you're obligated, and I bet there are plenty of soccer fans who wouldn't care if you pushed the league at all, but there's really no reason you shouldn't go beyond occasional mentions of Donovan and the Galaxy. You say soccer is poised to become big here, even after we've heard it all thousand times before. If you really believe that, and your column is an all-encompassing pot of sports discussion, then we should expect more than National Team thoughts or why Rajon Rondo would make a great goalkeeper, right?


You should have known better with that, by the way, but I'm willing to give you a one time pass. I've long thought Peter Crouch would be one of the best power forwards in the world if we gave him a few weeks to learn the position. Imagine his footwork!


Yeah, not so much.


So now you see the problem, why the trust isn't there yet. Try your best not to dumb the sport down. Do everything you can to be sure that if you write something, it's based on knowledge you possess and aspects you understand, not on idle speculation and need to fill column space (as if you struggle with that). If you babble about things you don't understand or you're guessing at, you do more harm than good.


I just don't want you to do this thing half-assed. I don't want to know that millions of American sports fans who might buy in because of you are going to ignore the domestic game because you do, or that they'll have poorly-conceived notions of the sport. And I won't lie, I shudder a bit to think that soccer's rise in the United States is going to be framed in the public consciousness by the guy who references Jersey Shore and Teen Wolf in almost everything he writes. Hey, maybe that's just me.


Damn you, Simmons. You took up this mantle, and now you better do something with it. If you're going to steal my thunder, try not to screw it up. Soccer fans tend to take this shit pretty seriously.


Consider yourself warned.


Excuse me while I go pull my tongue out of my cheek.