The Rich Eisen Show Top 5: How Andrew Siciliano Would Improve the World Cup

Andrew Siciliano wants the soccer world to know he loves the World Cup. He wrapped his arms around it on the show last Friday and gave it "a big abrazo." He has five suggestions for it anyway, and one request up front.

"Don't come back, I beg of you, with, well, you don't get it," Siciliano said. "No, no, no, I do get it."

His credentials are honest ones. Siciliano is a football guy and a baseball guy, maybe an NBA guy to a lesser degree, and he loves the Olympics, which he works for NBC. He does not wake at dawn on the West Coast for Premier League matches and could not tell you the table. But he went to an Arsenal game last year, a Boca Juniors game years ago in Buenos Aires, and a match just last week with his brother, a former youth travel player, and his nephew. He learned a lot. He also watched Team USA's big win over Australia in Seattle at a bar with Chris after the show, over a couple of lunchtime beers. "We had a blast," he said.

With the respect established, the suggestions.

The first is for the NFL, not FIFA. Siciliano wants football to get the "magic spray" that seems to cure soccer players on the spot. "Can you imagine if the NFL had this magic spray where a guy just comes out, he's magically cured?" he asked. No blue tent, no questionable tag. "High ankle sprain? Magic spray." The studio piled on with its own theories on the formula, from Robitussin to motor oil to Windex.

Suggestion two, he warned, is more controversial. Stop the clock during hydration breaks. Siciliano knows diehards hate the breaks, especially now that they come with commercials. But if the game is already stopped, he reasoned, why keep the clock running? "If you're going to go there and shake the sport to its foundation, then just stop the clock," he said. "At this point, what does it matter?" The rebuttal that time gets added at the end did not move him, since how much is up to the ref.

Purists will hate the third one, he admitted. Stop the clock for goals too. His illustration came from his own world. Imagine a running clock after touchdowns, and a Mac Jones touchdown to Ricky Pearsall with 15 seconds left in which the game simply ends while Jones is still celebrating with his teammates.

Number four, Siciliano figured, should be the least controversial of the bunch. "I need to see yellow cards and a lot of them for flopping." He knows the defense, that there is one referee and the theater is aimed at an audience of one. He does not buy it. He pointed to Albert Breer, a friend of the program, who got grief for tweeting about a flop in the Argentina game and responded by posting his old tweets criticizing NFL floppers. TJ was in. The only debate was over the color, since the NFL's penalty flag is already yellow. Siciliano insisted on yellow for the gravity of it: two and you are gone.

Before the last suggestion, he made one more case against the clock. "It's the only sport for which time is kept, but the time doesn't matter," he said, which drew agreement in the room. Right about then, Cristiano Ronaldo lined up a free kick on the studio monitor, having already scored what Siciliano called "a pretty sick goal."

The fifth suggestion came from Siciliano the broadcaster. American play-by-play voices calling games for American audiences, please use American subject-verb agreement. "England are" drives him up the wall. A broadcaster from the United Kingdom calling it that way is fine. An American broadcaster saying "Brazil are leading two to nothing" is not. He has even seen British agreement on American websites.

"It just sounds silly," Siciliano said. "Those are my five suggestions. Not criticisms, just suggestions."

He still likes soccer. He still embraces the World Cup. He just gets it enough to think some of it is silly.