Point-Counterpoint: Who Got A Bigger Screw Job – Rex Ryan or Bob Bradley?
By J-Dub and The Unknown Blogger
Editor’s Note: Today’s co-author The Unknown Blogger. This isn’t his first appearance on Dubsism; he’s been part of many things, most notably the Blogger’s Roast of J-Dub, and a particularity poignant installment of Tales of Depression and Sorrow. We would love to tell you more, but there’s a reason why he keeps his real identity under a paper bag….it’s far more than his being a life-long fan of the New York Jets. The Unknown Blogger would also like it noted for the record that he is in fact NOT Canadian, despite J-Dub’s constant accusations to the contrary. The Unknown Blogger was once thrown out of Canada for an incident he insists was actually J-Dub’s fault, and therefore to this day refers to Canada is “America’s after-birth.”
Football on either side of the Atlantic recently saw two guys lose their jobs for a lot of things which arguably weren’t their fault. So, today’s two authors both agree these guys got screwed; it’s really a question of degree.
J-Dub on Bob Bradley:
If you are not a follower of the English Premier League (EPL), you probably never heard of Bob Bradley. But if you are a real American, by the time you finish reading this article, not only will you be a fan of his, you’ll want to punch somebody.
Bob Bradley was fired by EPL club Swansea City on Tuesday. Bradley will forever be a footnote in the history of English football as he was the first American manager in the English Premier League, even if his time as Swansea boss was only 11 matches.
You read that right. Bradley’s tenure with the Welsh side was only 11 matches. That’s just a little under three months…in the middle of the season in between either transfer window.
Let me break down what that exactly means. The EPL season is 38 matches long; each team plays a home-and-home against each of the other 19 clubs in the league. The sides which finish in the top four spots qualify for the Champions League; a big money All-Europe competition. Clubs which finish in the fifth, sixth, and seventh spots get places in the Europa League, a smaller-money European competition. Conversely, the three clubs who end the season in the bottom three spots on the Premier League table are relegated down to the Championship…the equivalent of an Major League Baseball team being demoted to Triple-A.
Obviously, a baseball team will sell more tickets, get better endorsements, and have better television coverage if it is the same league with the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and Los Angeles Dodgers then they would playing 162 games against the likes of the Columbus Clippers, the Birmingham Barons, or the Fresno Bees.
That’s precisely the predicament in which Swansea finds itself. One match short of the halfway point in the season, Swansea finds itself in the heart of the relegation zone in 19th place, with a record of 3 wins, 3 draws, and 12 losses. They are only avoiding the Premier League cellar by being ahead of Hull City on goal differential.
Again, it’s not hard to see that Swansea are a club in grave danger of being sent down, but what was Bob Bradley supposed to do in only 85 days? Worse yet, he never had an opportunity to acquire players in one of the two transfer windows. (For Americans, the transfer windows are two periods during the year in which player contracts can be bought, sold, or loaned between clubs all across the world of football…think of it as a free-agency street bazaar where if you’ve got the money and can made the deals, anything is possible). Keep this in mind as we walk through why Bradley got hired in the first place.
His ascent in the football world realistically began with the U.S. Men’s National Team, whom he led to a Group Stage win at the 2010 World Cup. He followed that by taking the USMNT to the CONCACAF Gold Cup final in 2011. That success drew attention from potential European suitors such as Aston Villa, then in the EPL.
Despite his success, he was replaced as the head of the USMNT with Jurgen Klinsmann. Bradley then went on to make the Egyptian national team relevant; taking them from virtually nowhere to the verge of qualifying for the 2014 World Cup. Then Bradley joined Stabaek in the Norwegian top flight, and guided them into the qualifying round for the Europa League, being the first American manager to do so. Then he moved to French Ligue 2 side Le Havre and took them to within a hairs-breadth of promotion. And in his 11-match tenure with Swansea, he tripled the team wins and points total.
In other words, the guy left every team he touched better than he found it. That’s why Swansea hired him in the first place.
So why did they fire him? Because he’s an American.
World football is laden with anti-American snobbery based largely on our popular rejection of the game, and the world capital of that anti-Americanism is the English Premier League. It was bad enough when the EPL started attracting Aamerican ownership. Let’s be honest, American money spends as well as any. But it was an entirely different problem when the league started improting American players; you can’t buy the talent to play a sport. But an American manager was sacrilege, especially in an era where there are only a handful of English managers left in England’s top league.
Time for the elephant on the pitch; the real reason Bob Bradley lost his job …he’s an American, and English football simply wasn’t ready for that. The English media made that clear, the EPL fans made that clear, and the Swansea owners got the message loud and clear.
Here’s the worst part. The majority owners of Swansea are the same people who own the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. In other words, Bradley got fired for being an American BY AMERICANS!
There’s no bigger screw-job than that.
H/T: Men In Blazers
The Unknown Blogger on Rex Ryan:
Nice try, dickhead. Let me tell you something. If Bob Bradley were some sort of “American Hero,” then he wouldn’t be involved with that faggy sport anyway.
I’m on record here as being a New York Jets fan, and that means I loved Rex Ryan. The guy should get a fucking medal for getting to two AFC Championship Games with “Dirty Butt-fumble” Sanchez as his quarterback. But this isn’t about Rex’s time in the Big Apple – this is about his time in New York State’s “Big Anus” – Buffalo.
Who are we kidding here? You could make the world’s biggest asshole ranch by putting a barbed-wire fence around Buffalo. I felt bad for Rex going to that electrified shit-pump of a city and team, and even though the Bills butt-fucked him harder than Edward Norton in “American History X,” I’m glad he got out of there.
To keep the ass-fuck analogy going, Rex got pushed up against the wall of a prison shower and ended up with more stitches in his asshole than one of your grandmother’s quilts. As for Bradley, the Brits are such mincing little Nancy-Boys that popping your cock up some other guy’s butt is considered a proper form of greeting.
What the hell did this new owner, Pig-Fucker or whatever his name is, think the guy was supposed to do with this team? What does he expect anybody to do with this team?
Quick, and without looking, can you tell me the last coach to win 10 games with this sorry-ass franchise? Give yourself a cigar if you said Wade Phillips in 19999. Since then this team was owned by a guy who was in his late 400s, then he croaked, then this team was bought by an oil and gas guy who thinks he knows something about sports because he can write checks with more zeros than Geno Smith’s Wonderlic scores.
You can tell what this guy knows about football would fit in his ass with plenty of room left for his head based on the fact that he got rid of a pretty damn good coach and kept a booger-eating moron in general manager Doug Whaley. Just look at how he’s handled the Tyrod Taylor situation. At first, Whaley says that Taylor isn’t playing this Sunday because the team wants to avoid a clause in his contract which guarantees Taylor $30 million if he suffers a “significant injury.” Then we discover that Taylor is actually injured, and is headed to Philadelphia today to see a specialist for what is being described as a “groin/sports hernia issue.” Here’s the thing. Whaley could have just put the guy on injured reserve for the final, meaningless game of the season and nobody would have said a word about it. But no, Whaley had to make himself, his organization, and his owner look like of bunch of cheapskate dickweeds. That kind of incompetence should tell you all you need to know about Doug Whaley.
In other words, Bradley got a screw-job, but he deserves it for being an American were Americans don’t belong. REx Ryan is a competent guy who had his team moving in the right direction, and he gets fired because Doug Whaley is an idiot who tossed him under the bus to save his own ass. There’s nothing worse than being the scapegoat for somebody else’s bullshit.
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5 comments on “Point-Counterpoint: Who Got A Bigger Screw Job – Rex Ryan or Bob Bradley?”
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Agreed and agreed. Bradley didn’t belong in the “club.” Dead man walking from the moment he signed in England. Ryan wanted to stay being a head coach and this was his only/last option, working for a franchise likely to relocate to England. The Taylor situation has been handled in a truly pathetic fashion.
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Here’s the real questions: How the hell did Swansea’s ownership not know they would face this “anti-American” problem? Do they not know the fact they bailed on a guy so quickly means they just shot themselves in the foot for getting a quality manager?
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I think they absolutely underestimated the backlash. When the wins didn’t come quickly…they then doubled down by absolutely underestimating how this looks to quality managers who might have otherwise signed on. Bizarre.
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