$%^@ the Rapids

People have often talked about the Rapids being a bad team, but anyone who has been there since the start can tell you that isn't true. No, the big crime of the Rapids has always been mediocrity. They've historically been that middle-of-the-road team that you can usually count on to not finish last in the league, but who always turn some eyebrows up when they're near the top, as well. If you asked an average MLS fan to name every team in the league, they'd probably get named near the end. They're the Carolina Hurricanes of MLS, right down to the title that nobody's quite sure how they won but was quickly forgotten outside of everyone there shortly after.

I, personally, don't mind mediocrity. Since most of the sports teams we have now in this town weren't around when I was born, I followed Buffalo sports as a kid. Nothing says 'endless mediocrity' more than the Buffalo Bills and Sabres. Hell, even my favorite European team is a yo-yo club that was mid-table in the Championship nearly every year since I started following them, recent shock successes and administration years aside. Mediocrity is my bread and butter, and I thrive on waiting for rebuilding to finally click with a mediocre side. I find it much more fascinating and fun to hope and love a mediocre side than I ever would to support a team like Manchester United, where you expect trophies every single year and a 4th-place finish means temper tantrums from the fanbase.

Obviously, there are plenty of people who aren't as tolerant of mediocrity as me in the Rapids fanbase, and that's fine. Expecting greatness every year might be a bit much, in my opinion, but getting frustrated over mediocrity lingering over every second of play and every move is a position that makes sense to me.

That argument is past. The Rapids are long past mediocrity now. We are now into our third straight season of not mediocrity, but awful, putrid badness. The Rapids are not a team that can spring up to surprise people anymore, like they were in 2013. They are a team that was awful two years ago, worse last year and making moves to make themselves even worse for the future. They are tied to the worst head coach I have ever seen in my long years of watching soccer, and it's a coach that they insist will be sticking around.

My cardinal sin when it comes to sports is not a team that is mediocre, or even a team that is bad. It's a team that doesn't try to improve. This is why I've only been to a single Rockies game in the past 4 years; the Rockies are the OG of not actually bothering to do anything that might actively improve the team, and it wore on me as the years went along. People ask me all the time why I'm a Bills fan, how I can stand watching that product year-in and year-out. It's because they're trying, at the very least, to make things better. I've seen a lot of 7-9 Bills teams since I started watching the NFL in the early 00s, but at least those were different Bills teams doing it. Effort goes a long, long way in my book.

The current iteration of the Rapids lacks effort in a way that I've never seen before.

And, of course, there was the hilarious assertion that Pablo just needed more of 'his guys' on the team in order for success to follow, when Oscar Pareja was still operating with a squad that had at least a few of Gary Smith's guys on it when he took the Rapids to the playoffs in 2013.

The Tim Howard thing was covered by plenty of media, not just Rapids media, and called a 'desperation move' by most of them. It's going to be expensive, useless for a team that was defensively stout (for most of the year until St. Ledger came in and was handed a starting spot, anyway) and offensively inept, and would require making a back-up of not one, but two solid MLS keepers. Their response to it? Simple, just trade the keepers!

That, my friends, is the point where mediocrity stops and insane levels of awful begin. Just add another scratch mark to the cell of shit that we've been imprisoned in as Rapids fans. (And our sentence doesn't look like it will be ending any time soon.)

I couldn't figure out what I should title this post for a long while. I'm usually good at punchy little titles, like "The Rapids can't possibly be this stupid" or "The Rapids Way can now be pronounced dead". Eventually I just decided to go with my placeholder title that had been there since before I started typing it because seriously, I've run out of other things to say or ways to say it. Fuck the Rapids.