America Gets Bounced, World Cup Picks, Knicks Fan Bliss, ‘Heat 2’ and ‘The Odyssey’ With Chris Ryan, Anthony Dabbundo, and Jason Concepcion

**Bill Simmons** (0:00)
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The Bill Simmons Podcast, we are live on Netflix right after Team USA got knocked out of the World Cup. I have Anthony Dabbundo and Chris Ryan here. Wanted to mention, Oli, New Rewatchables is now up, and Zach Lowe and I did a basketball podcast yesterday, if you missed it. All right, guys, I don't know why, but I had hope, I was excited for this game. I, especially when Balagan got thrown back in with the Seattle crowd, I watched the whole two-hour pregame show. Ironically, I also saw The Odyssey today, a three-hour, just a grueling, trying to get through it, watching our hero try to land the plane at the end, and was hoping maybe there was some parallels.

**Chris Ryan** (2:39)
Classic homework, just trying to land the plane, man.

**Bill Simmons** (2:42)
Was hoping there was some parallels for America today, and CR, there was not. It was a terrible, terrible, terrible performance by us.

**Chris Ryan** (2:50)
Another pod, another colonoscopy here for us.
Yeah, that was a real talent disparity, and maybe a little bit of a wake up call. It's been an awesome tournament. I think that the country has embraced the sport. It's been one of the greatest couple of sporting weeks of my life. But that was Real Madrid's goalkeeper, and Manchester City's winger came on in the 60th minute, and Telemans just won the Europa League with Aston Villa, and I thought maybe that extra 15 to 20 percent of talent really put us in our spot. What did you think, Anthony?

**Bill Simmons** (3:27)
What about you, Dabbundo?

**Anthony Dabbundo** (3:29)
We wondered what would happen the first time this defense actually got tested because the three games that the starters played were not against teams who were going to test them, and I couldn't have imagined they could have failed that test anymore. I mean, it was every single time. It was very simple. Belgium played a long ball.
They won the long ball, our defense panicked, Dest panicked, Reem panicked, Richard's panicked, Freeman panicked, and they gave away the ball over and over again, and any team, I mean, Belgium were fine, but I thought they made it way too easy. It's ridiculous.

**Bill Simmons** (4:01)
This was, it felt like karaoke of all the things you would be worried about in a bad America game, right? Most of the guys, we talked about this for the tournament. The guys I was the most worried about were Reem and Dest. Dest was unplayable. I mean, that was like, he was so bad that he picked him up at a halftime.
Reem looked every bit 38 years old.
The keeper had one of the worst F-ups we've had in a long time in a World Cup game. And then the other piece was, hey, it would be nice if Poulsic just was awesome and stayed healthy for an entire game. And he stunk in the first half and then got hurt in the second half. And, Sierra, I was almost wondering, everybody talking about Baugen when he got the red card, he was out, and then the dialogue for three, four days was, he's our best guy, we can't lose our best guy. And then he comes back, our best guy is back. And it could have gone one of two ways for Poulsic, where it's like, oh, he's gonna show everybody who the actual best guy in this team is, or he was gonna have the game he had today, where he looked like he was a freshman in high school playing varsity.