OK....the U.S. lost to Ghana for the second time in a row...taking us out of the chase for the World Cup.

We couldn’t stop with all the soccer stuff then???

Guess not.

No offense to those of you who are big soccer fans. It’s just that we keep getting told that this or that isn’t put on television because not enough people will watch. And that should apply to soccer as well.

While it may be the No. 1 sport on the planet, 95 percent of profitable television is basically here in the United States. Elsewhere, no problem. Have all the soccer (or futbol) on TV that you want. It’s your televisions networks, your culture...knock yourselves out.

But, here in the USA, it’s a bit different. We love our football, baseball and basketball. Shoot. We’ve even been tracking, darn near with satellites, where in the heck LeBron James is going to sign to play next year.

Don’t think we really care about David Beckham’s injury...do you?

My conspiracy theory thoughts are this: I think ESPN is desperately trying to build up a sport it can put on television at 3 a.m. in the morning, instead of reruns of its previous night’s MLB telecast.

I think ESPN is mad at hockey for self-destructing and ending up way off buried in the cable boondocks on the Versus channel.

Now it has to run NASCAR (requires lots of cameras and communications technology to cover) and talk about gear ratios and car setups and degrees of bank on Turn 3 at Talledaga.

They’re Yankees. They don’t understand all that stuff.

So, in the absence of hockey, and the presence of NASCAR, they’re trying to get us to get hooked on a sport that consists of watching a bunch of 5’ 7” guys run up and down the field for 60 minutes without stopping, complete with an un-understandable additional time requirement, and only a couple of scores per game.

Now American citizens are really going to eat that up.

At least those who drive hybrids will.

And back to not putting on television that which not many will watch.

Loyd Cook has worked in newspapers for 17 years. He has earned multiple sportswriting and newswriting awards from the Texas Press Association and the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors organization.