Some thoughts and observations on this years season and women's college soccer in general:
1) USC is the best team in the country by a wide margin. I haven't seen all the teams play, but I've seen enough (Stanford, UCLA, N.C., Penn State, Notre Dame, South Carolina, Cal, Florida).
2) USC has the best offensive attack in the country by a wide margin. They are the only team that actually has a plan of attack in the final third. Not only do they have a plan, they have the patience, IQ, chemistry, and creativity to execute it better than any other team.
3) Not sure if their offensive attack is coaching, player chemistry, individual player IQ, or individual creativity, but if it is coaching, McApine should be the USWNT head coach, or at a minimum, the U-17 USWNT head coach.
4) Anthony, Johnson, and Pruitt are easily the best trio of strikers in the nation on one team. Their ability to play with their backs against the goal gives USC many more offensive options as compared to other teams.
5) USC's midfielder #6 will be a nice replacement after Andrews graduates.
6)It's amazing to me how many teams (including many ranked teams) have absolutely NO plan in the final third. The coaches should be embarrassed that their teams are still playing kickball at this level.
7) UCLA misses Jenkins and will not make it to the quarters without her.
8) South Carolina is a joke at #3. They have a nice striker and that's it. If they ever meet the other USC, I predict a 5-0 win for the Trojans.
9) I saw North Carolina play a couple of times this year (my first time really seeing them, once against USC) and what I observed is that the Anson Dorrance philosophy of soccer is to out-athlete you (subbing in 5 or 6 players at a time as if to say I am just going to exhaust your team with run after run). Am I right? I saw a post on another forum basically confirming my suspicions. I basically saw a kickball team out there. If I am right, why is this guy so celebrated? Just because he figured out how to get results this way before everybody else? Absolute joke!!
10) Why isn't the Pac-12 as dominant, or even more for that matter, as the ACC? CalSouth absolutely dominates at the youth level (YNC's, ODP championships, National team players, etc.) and yet struggles to have more than three teams ranked in the top 25. I don't get that. And that's that Cal-North, Az, Nv, Ut., & Co. have plenty of good players that feed into the Pac-12. Is it bias in the ranking system? I tend to think not so much as the ACC definitely has substantially more national championships than the Pac-12. If you take a look at college softball as a comparison, California (and more specifically Southern CA softball) absolutely dominates the college scene. Even in the years WITHOUT a California team in the college world series (8 final teams), there are more than double the California girls on those 8 teams than any other state. A couple of years ago the final was Oklahoma against Tennessee and there were more girls from California than from either OK or TN in that game. Bottom line, you can't win in softball without California girls.
