I joined the Star Tribune’s Michael Rand, on his daily podcast, to talk about all things Minnesota United FC. Among the topics discussed: why the Loons can’t score, why their defense is better, and what’s the deal with soccer analytics these days.

Major League Baseball’s unmitigated success with its new pitch clock is sweeping the nation. Americans have clock fever! The pitch clock, were it a single person, would be the most popular figure in the history of baseball!

This is hyperbole, but not ridiculous hyperbole. Baseball has managed to cut a half-hour or so out of its usual running time, without changing anything major about the game itself, and all simply by putting an actual clock in view, to help umpires enforce the rules about pace of play that were already on the books.

With this in mind, I think it’s time for the next step: there should be a pitch clock in soccer.

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Through 55 minutes, Minnesota United’s 2-1 loss against Orlando City looked like it would be another in a series of tight, cagey defensive performances by the Loons.

Orlando had yet to create anything that looked like a scoring chance. The Loons weren’t much more dangerous.

Ten minutes into the second half, though, Minnesota made a change that, finally, unlocked their own offense - but in the process, gave the Lions the space that they needed to steal three points.

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In 1995, John Feinstein published “A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour,” an insider’s account of the 1994 PGA Tour season. The central cast of the book includes Zimbabwe’s Nick Price, the world’s top-ranked golfer at the time, and the man who led the money list on the 1994 tour.

The book adopts a head-shaking, almost tongue-clucking tone at the sum that Price earned that season, an otherworldly $1,499,927. It’s cast as almost too much money for a single golfer to make, a sum that would potentially deflate Price’s desire to not only compete, but to ever play golf again. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a little less than $3 million in 2022.

On the 2022 PGA Tour, 26 golfers earned more than $3 million for the season.

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I have a friend, let’s call him Mike (not his real name), who is a fan of the Loons. He’s not a Minnesota United dilettante; he has strong opinions about Franco Fragapane, and he’s the type that can name every backup fullback on the roster. He lives outside the metro, so he doesn’t get to come to as many games as he’d like, and he has a young family, so there are occasional bedtime-related issues to put a damper on his TV viewing.

What I’m saying is that he might not be a card-carrying MNUFC sicko, but he’s definitely in that next tier: serious fandom, someone who cares a lot about the Loons, as much as he cares about the Timberwolves and every other one of his favorite sports teams.

And he doesn’t have MLS Season Pass.

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It’s the fifth year of Bob Motzko’s tenure as the head coach of the Gopher men’s hockey team, and the second consecutive in which Minnesota has won the Big Ten championship and reached the Frozen Four.

This seems pretty good, all things considered, but we need something a little more scientific to determine just where he ranks in the pantheon of Gopher coaches. Luckily, we’ve got just such a scientific system, which I just made up, but which I consider to be better than any other system ever designed to rank the first five years of every Gopher men’s hockey coach’s tenure (subject to further review of the literature). Here it is.

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Three games after Karl-Anthony Towns’s return to the Timberwolves lineup, one thing is clear: it’s time for the Wolves to win something.

Note that this is a far cry from saying that this is the Wolves’ time to shine, or that the Wolves are going to win something - only that there’s an urgency for this particular team to achieve, because suddenly it seems like this might be as good as things are going to get.

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It’s easy to say that Minnesota United is a different team without Emanuel Reynoso in the lineup. After four games, though, we’re seeing just how different, and how the team has changed its methods.

What we’ve discovered is that, rather successfully, Minnesota United has become Burnley FC.

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It was another iconic snow opener for Minnesota United, a night that will live on in images: Kervin Arriaga making a snow angel during warmups. Michael Boxall and Kemar Lawrence refusing to wear long sleeves or gloves. The grounds crew, wearing shorts, clearing the snow with leaf blowers. It was a night to remember, a night for photos and warm clothes and another edition of soccer in the snow in St. Paul. Iconic, right?

Unless you were playing or coaching, that is. Then you were peeved.

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MNUFC was stuck with one of the weirder schedules in Major League Soccer this year, in that their bye week - every team will get one this year, because there are an odd number of teams in the league - came in week two. And so the Loons won their season opener in Dallas, then immediately got two weeks off. But now, finally, it’s time for Minnesota’s home opener, so here’s a look at the three headlines that we’ll all be talking about this weekend.

Snowpener Redux

As time passes, Minnesota’s first home game in MLS will be remembered more and more for the several inches of snow that fell, and less and less for the fact that the Loons lost 6-1 to fellow expansion team Atlanta. The orange ball! The crews clearing the lines of the penalty area! Let these remove your memories of Vadim Demidov and company!

Well, it’s six years later, but it’s about to happen again. St. Paul got three inches of snow Thursday night into Friday, with four to six more predicted to fall on Saturday. The Loons posted a video of the grounds crew desperately clearing the field Thursday evening, something they’ll likely have to do multiple times before kickoff on Saturday. Assistant groundskeeper Peter Braun Jr. tweeted “[praying hands emoji] that the field heat keeps up” on Thursday morning.

While the snow on turf in 2017 was bad enough, the Loons’ 2022 home opener - from a field perspective - was almost worse. A freak thunderstorm, in 33 degree weather, dropped nearly an inch of rain on the Twin Cities. Lightning delayed the game for 75 minutes, during which time the field became a mudpit, and couldn’t recover until the summer.

Two months later, the team began adding a “hybrid” synthetic layer to the field, in hopes of stabilizing it.

The Allianz Field crew has struggled with the playing surface ever since the stadium opened. In 2019, the first year of the stadium, any sort of stress would result in huge divots coming out of the turf, and the club discovered a drainage problem towards the end of the year and had to replace the entire field.

Fixed or not, though, both last year’s home opener, and another thunderstorm that postponed a US Open Cup match against Colorado, temporarily turned the field into Lake Allianz.

Drainage problems aside, hybrid pitch or no, snow’s not going to help - and it’s not like the grounds crew can re-grow a lot of grass in March. Minnesota’s next home game is two weeks away.

As Braun said: if only the home opener was before the snow.

Annual injury crisis arrives before spring does

Per Andy Greder on Twitter, Minnesota’s annual injury crisis has arrived early this year.

Center backs Doneil Henry, Brent Kallman, and Mikael Marques are all out for Saturday’s game, as is left back Ryen Jiba. Defensive midfielder Wil Trapp is doubtful.

Assuming all miss the game, this leaves the Loons with just two healthy center backs, one left back (plus teenager Devin Padelford), two right backs, and zero defensive midfielders.

One assumes the Loons would probably play a midfield of Kervin Arriaga, Hassani Dotson, and Robin Lod, with Joseph Rosales in reserve. But Arriaga would be the backup center back, and Dotson would probably be the backup left back, so both better be prepared to play a full 90 minutes on Saturday night, regardless of the weather.

Up front, Emanuel Reynoso is still nowhere to be found, and Bongokuhle Hlongwane is questionable as well.

Maybe it’s a good thing that Tani Oluwaseyi saw his first-ever MLS action against Dallas; that might be the only way the Loons have more than three players with MLS experience on the bench in this game.

Reporting on the Red Bulls

It doesn’t seem like that long ago that New York was one of the main MLS destinations for big-name European talent. Thierry Henry! Bradley Wright-Phillips! Juan Pablo Angel!

Anyway, the newer versions of RBNY (NYRB? I’ve never been clear on this) aren’t so much like that. They’ve got really good players; people talk about attacking midfielder Lewis Morgan as a breakout star, and left back John Tolkin is just 20 years old, and headed for a move to Europe, maybe as soon as this year. But it’s much more about youth than big names these days in Harrison, New Jersey.

You’d have to be a true European soccer hipster to know much about new striker Dante Vanzeir (he fired Union St. Gilloise back to the top division in Belgium for the first time in a half-century, then propelled them to the Europa League!), but New York is excited about him, as well as super-sub striker Cory Burke, who they signed from his role as a super-sub striker with Philadelphia.

The Red Bulls are a model of consistency; they’ve made the playoffs for 13 consecutive years, the longest stretch in MLS. That said, they haven’t won a playoff game since 2018. They’re just always there, which is why the expert predictions for this season are all over the map; some have them in 10th, some have them in third. It’s hard to get a read on a team that just always wins.

The Red Bulls are going to line up and they’re going to get in battles all over the field, and they’re going to press and run and generally try to cause havoc. What I don’t know is if the snow, a great agent of chaos, will help or hurt them. They haven’t scored a goal yet this season, but they also haven’t allowed a shot on goal in two games (except for a penalty kick against Orlando, also the only goal the team has allowed).

Who knows what to expect on Saturday? Based on everything, it could be a rugby match - punt it long, and hope for a defensive player to slip and fall.