The USMNT's Round of 16 exit came at Lumen Field in Seattle, where Belgium put up a 4-1 scoreline that never felt in doubt. Charles De Ketelaere scored twice, Malik Tillman's deflected free kick was the lone US answer, and a Matt Freese error outside the box turned a fixable deficit into a rout. Belgium moves on to face Spain in the quarterfinals. The US goes home, again, and the discourse hasn't slowed down since.
On the Barstool set, Nick Turani and Eddie debated whether getting embarrassed is actually the wake-up call this team needed.
That's been the split reaction all week: is this humiliating enough to actually fix something, or is it the same 4-year cycle repeating itself? Dave Portnoy leaned hard into the latter, cracking that "big soccer" tricks "good clean hardworking Americans" into believing every 4 years, only to get "embarrassed on an intergalactic level". He followed it up by noting Belgium and Ohio have the same population, which is the kind of detail that stings more the longer you sit with it.
By the time Pardon My Take rolled into Tahoe Week for their July 8 show, the loss was still the top of the rundown. Taylor Twellman, a former USMNT forward himself, joined the guys for what got billed as a full World Cup postmortem.
Taylor Twellman broke down the loss on air, with 'WHAT ARE WE DOING?' plastered across the screen.
The Tahoe crew wasn't gentle about it either. Big Cat, PFT and the rest of the panel picked the performance apart live from the American Century Championship, and the quotes did the damage the highlights couldn't.
Big Cat, PFT, Hank and Zac tore into the loss from the Tahoe Week set, calling the team 'cooked' and saying it looked like the US 'didn't care.'
Big Cat kept pressing the point on his own timeline, arguing this wasn't a team that could hide behind a tough draw. Expanded field, favorable bracket, a supposed golden generation of talent, hosting duties that were supposed to be an advantage. "We're not some small country," he wrote, adding that other countries with the same result would call it a failure outright and asking why the US gets a pass every time this happens.
Amid all the piling on, Folarin Balogun tried to take some ownership. The Monaco striker, who'd been at the center of a red-card controversy earlier in the tournament before being cleared to play against Belgium, posted an apology to fans after the loss, vowing the program will bounce back.
None of it changes the outcome. The US is out, Belgium plays Spain on Friday, and Barstool will keep running this back for as long as Tahoe Week gives them a microphone. The real question, the one Big Cat keeps circling, isn't why this loss happened. It's why anyone's still surprised it happens every single time.