Happy Monday! Getting ready for an 8-hour shift at the Watching The World Cup Factory today, resting, and then clocking in tomorrow for another 8-hour shift at the Watching The World Cup Factory. It’s a tough job but someone’s gotta do it.

– Rodger Sherman

Don’t you hate it when you wanted to be cynical about something but it rules?

The FIFA World Cup is now 48 teams, 50 percent larger than ever before. The reason for this was blatant: Cash. FIFA has never been shy about chasing paper, and had billions of reasons to expand the World Cup that had nothing to do with soccer. Adding dozens of extra games to the tournament allowed FIFA to sell more games to broadcasters and sell millions of extra tickets at the most expensive World Cup ever.

But the addition of 16 new teams has been, quite frankly, delightful. Just about every team making a first-time-in-a-long-time appearance has made its mark in some way on the tournament, and it doesn’t feel to me like there’s been a marked increase in unwatchable blowouts. Did FIFA actually do something right?

The United States had advanced out of group play before at the men’s World Cup — but it was never not stressful.

In 2002, they needed to scoreboard-watch South Korea’s surprising win over Portugal to know they advanced. In 2010, they were minutes away from elimination when Landon Donovan scored in the 91st minute against Algeria. In 2022, they needed a win against Iran on the final day — a draw wouldn’t cut it. The calmest one was probably 2014, when they had a huge goal differential advantage on Portugal, but even then I was a little worried Germany would run up the score on us.

This time? Two games, two wins: top of the group. The Americans had multi-goal leads at halftime against both Paraguay and Australia to clinch first place in the group. The USMNT soccer experience had always been gut-wrenching and nail-biting — but this was a party, a 70,000-person sing-along.

This is the best USMNT I’ve ever seen. They’re the most talented, the most coherent, and the most fun to watch. And as I look at the path ahead of them, it’s getting pretty hard to summon the same level of nervousness I’m used to.

The most bizarre game of the World Cup so far. Paraguayan star Miguel Almirón became the first player to receive a straight red card due to a new FIFA rule banning players from covering their mouths while arguing with opponents, put in place to combat the apparently widespread practice of covertly saying horribly racist things. (The rule stems from an incident in the Champions League this year; the player in question used the extremely rare “I didn’t say anything racist, I said something homophobic” defense, which, guess what, also bad. Here is a hot Australian guy speaking in favor of the rule.)

However, despite playing for the entire second half with a man advantage, Turkey couldn’t score, and got eliminated. They had 78 percent possession, attempted 32 shots, and none of them went in — a repeat of their 2-0 loss to Australia where they had 72 percent possession, attempted 30 shots, and none of them went in. The Paraguayans are just the fourth team ever to win a World Cup game after a first-half red card.

The World Cup has a breakout star in Stuttgart’s Denis Undav, who came into the game in the second half and scored both goals to steal three points for Germany. Undav is a late bloomer who went totally unnoticed by the thorough German youth development program; he started his career playing semi-pro and worked at a factory as a teen. He didn’t make it to the Bundesliga until he was 26 and didn’t get his first national team call-up until he was 27 — and now, at 29, he’s on top of the Golden Boot race at the World Cup, with three goals and two assists in 54 total minutes of gametime.

Extremely funny to me that Tunisia lost their first game by four goals, fired their coach (the first team in World Cup history to do so before being fully eliminated from a tournament), flew in Herve Renard, the dashing, stylish Frenchman who specializes in short-term World Cup managerial stints, and then lost their second game by four goals.

Another hero goalkeeper; incredible save by Alireza Beiranvand. Iran could have won the game if Mehdi Tarami had a smaller butt, as he was ruled offside by a cheek. (But would he have had the confidence to score the goal if his butt was smaller?)

Ismael Saibari scored 70 seconds in; Scotland spent the next 90 minutes trying and failing to get a shot on goal.

OK, so it really was just Cape Verde’s keeper who could keep Spain from scoring.

I mentioned that something cool had happened to nine of the teams appearing in their first World Cup of the 21st century ………… unfortunately, Haiti is the tenth.

I knew foreigners would discover some wonderful American things that simply aren’t available overseas — Buc-ees and BBQ, for example — but gonna be honest, I had no idea North America was cornering the market on raccoons.

Michigan head coach Dusty May is making the jump to the NBA after leading the Wolverines to a national championship — just like Jim Harbaugh going to the Chargers after winning the football title in 2023. I’ve been a Dusty May fan ever since covering his Final Four run at Florida Atlantic. I think he can win anywhere — even the franchise that traded Luka Doncic and let Jalen Brunson walk. (Jokes aside, they seem like they’re doing a smart rebuild around Cooper Flagg with Masai Ujiri pulling the strings.)

Wyndham Clark won his second U.S. Open, the first time somebody has led after all four rounds of the tournament since 2014. Weirdly, the tournament was dominated by discussion of Clark’s apparently massive unpopularity, as the crowd on Long Island ripped into him for four straight days.

I don’t think anybody expected Kate Douglass to set the world record in the 50m freestyle this weekend — including Douglass, who yelped a confused “OH MY GOD! I DON’T KNOW??!?!?!” after seeing the number pop up. Douglass is the reigning Olympic and World Champion in the 200m breaststroke — which is a lot longer than 50m, and a different stroke. Previously, Sweden’s Sarah Sjostrom had the top seven times in the 50m.

In a blockbuster NHL trade, the Ottawa Senators have traded Brady Tkachuk to join his brother Matthew on the Florida Panthers. It feels like a coup for Florida; I wonder if Tkachuk’s career in the Canadian capital became untenable after he was the face of the Trump administration’s anti-Canadian AI slop campaign during the Olympics.

Monday, 7 p.m. ET, in Omaha (ESPN)

UNC and Oklahoma split the first two games of the championship series, so the season comes down to one all-or-nothing game for the title. College baseball teams typically don’t have three good starting pitchers, and both teams have burned through their best pitchers just to get to this point; Oklahoma is rolling with a freshman who has exactly two starts this year, one against The Citadel, while UNC’s coach said he’s deciding between seven (!!!) guys to potentially take the mound tonight.

Tuesday, 8 p.m. ET, in Brooklyn (ABC)

Analysts think this is a really special draft class, and BYU’s A.J. Dybantsa is expected to go first overall. (We’ve been writing about him for a while!) For the first time in my entire life, I have not thought for even a second about who I want the Knicks to pick. I assume they do have a guy on staff who’s been thinking about that, in between the parade and everything.

(All games on FOX/Telemundo unless otherwise noted.)

Monday, 5 p.m. ET, in Philadelphia

Hopefully everybody remembered not to decorate the Rocky statue.

Monday, 8 p.m. ET, in New Jersey

Norwegian fans have arrived in New York, doing their “Viking row” celebration in Times Square; Senegalese fans have been in New York for quite some time, as evidenced by the parties on 116th street after they won the African Cup of Nations.

Monday, 11 p.m. ET, in San Jose (FS1/Telemundo)

The most entertaining soccer in the coming days at the World Cup might be in these do-or-die type games between the clear 3rd-and-4th best teams in each group. Nobody’s gonna be playing for a draw!

Tuesday, 1 p.m. ET, in Houston.

All eyes on Cristiano Ronaldo, who was disastrous in Portugal’s first game. Surely, they’ll beat the 54th-ranked team in the world, even if he once again provides nothing positive … but they just failed to beat the 43rd-ranked team in the world, so who knows.

Tuesday, 4 p.m. ET, in Foxboro

Plenty of overlap between these teams — England’s Kobbie Mainoo is of Ghanaian descent, Ghana’s best player, Antoine Semenyo, was born in London and plays for Manchester City. Canada denied a visa to Ghanaian midfielder Thomas Partey due to his upcoming rape trial in England, preventing him from playing in the team’s first game in Toronto, but he has been able to enter the United States and will play in this one.

Tuesday, 7 p.m. ET, in Toronto (FS1/Telemundo)

If Panama doesn’t win this game, isthmus beat England to advance, and I think we canal agree that would be a pretty tough task.

Tuesday, 10 p.m. ET, in Guadalajara

Impact sub coming for DR Congo: Lumumba Vea, the fan who imitates a statue of legendary Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba for all 90 minutes of every DR Congo game, has made it to Guadalajara after missing the Portugal game due to quarantine rules.

If you’re also a soccer casual looking for Content: I added Soccerwise to my podcast queue at the start of the World Cup, and it’s been exactly what I was looking for: A smart, daily show breaking down the World Cup that covers the whole event while also getting really in-depth about the USMNT. (And also, has one guy who keeps interrupting soccer conversations to talk about the Knicks, WHO WON THE NBA FINALS, BY THE WAY.) Here’s their YouTube channel and their podcast feed.