ESPNMAG.com - Bottom of the Bay

Surely, this has to be rock bottom for the Tampa Bay Mutiny. With the resignation of coach Alfonso Mondelo this morning, a club that last year was one of the best in MLS -- both in terms of results and style -- begins a monumental reconstruction process.

New coach Perry Van Der Beck (I'm told the Mutiny will not use the term "interim" as a matter of semantics) will take a team with a 3-12-1 record into tomorrow night's match with Chicago. Moreover, Van Der Beck, who was a club-appointed assistant coach to Mondelo -- as opposed to a coach hand-picked by the former coach -- has to hope that a group of players who completely tuned out Mondelo will listen to him.

Mutiny players took the high road upon hearing that Mondelo had resigned, saying the usual stuff about it being "the players' fault, not the coaches." But truth be told, the players had been griping about Mondelo since pre-season when the coach seemed to focus 90 percent on fitness and only 10 percent on anything involving the ball. That type of approach is fine if the team gets out of the gates playing strongly, but when you have a terrible start and your practices consist of jumping over boxes in 100-degree heat, well, that's the recipe for -- please, pardon the weak pun -- mutiny.

I'm guessing one of the reasons Mondelo got the position in the first place is because he bought into GM (and wannabe coach) Bill Manning's belief that the Mutiny needed to scrap the 4-5-1 system that Tim Hankinson employed last season and instead find a partner for Mamadou Diallo.

So, it's hard to have too much sympathy for all the tactical problems the Mutiny have experienced this year -- not to mention the alienation and eventual trade of Carlos Valderrama -- because Mondelo knew what he was getting into when he signed on to work "with" Manning. Ironically, just about any coach you talk to in MLS thought Hankinson's formation last year was brilliant. They also thought calling it a 4-5-1 was kind of funny, because Valderrama was, for all intents and purposes, a forward.

In defense of Mondelo and Manning, the Mutiny have had a lot of injuries to deal with this season, particularly along their backline. But they should not have dug this deep of a hole. If there's one positive to take out of it, well, maybe it's better that they've hit rock bottom now than a month from now, when there would have been no time left to rebuild.

In Tight Space

Musa Shannon, the man the MetroStars would like to sign as their Clint Mathis Replacement -- has asked MLS for two more weeks to see if he can find a club in Europe and it appears the league is going to move on. "Giovanni Savarese is now in the pole position to replace Mathis," is how one league official updated the situation.

As for Chicago's search for a Josh Wolff Replacement, everything is on hold as the Fire await Peter Nowak's green card. Problem is, no one knows for sure if Nowak's paper work will be completed in three weeks or three months.

Major League Soccer's "take" on the postponed FIFA World Club Championships was $750,000, which one league official described as, "barely enough to cover the costs of preparing DC United and Los Angeles for the CONCACAF championships" last year.

MLS is also miffed over the draw for the third round of the U.S. Open Cup. The league thought that teams that played on the road in the second round -- specifically, San Jose and Miami (the Fusion played on their home field but had to give up gate receipts to Uruguay SC) -- would get home matches in the third round. Instead, San Jose is going on the road to play Milwaukee and Miami is going to Columbus.

According to a source, three clubs are interested in taking U.S. defender David Regis at the league maximum salary, but the league isn't prepared to pay that much because they fear it would disrupt the pay scale for defenders in the league.

You had to get a few goose bumps the other night watching 17-year old Edward Johnson stirring things up in the final moments of the Dallas-New England match, and ultimately striking the game-tying goal in the final seconds of injury time. Johnson, from Palm Coast, Fla., has speed and power and, from what I've seen, a nice feel for the game. Another young attacking player for American fans to keep an eye on.

I'm going to bask in this a little bit. On draft day, I wrote that I thought Columbus did well with the signing of Tenywa Bonseu and the trade for Tom Presthus ... and a lot of Crew fans dissed me bad. Well, Bonseu is rock solid and Presthus may be the Keeper of the Year for the first half of the season. So, how do you like these moves now?

Pub Talk

Risky Business was on cable the other night. Talk about a movie that did not age well. I'm embarrassed to say I was one who thought Ray Bans were very cool in 1983.

Glad to see Tampa has improved those heinous skin-tight uniforms by changing to matching powder blue shorts. I'm kidding -- they look like they were taken off the X-Games sale rack at Target. And it's not Kappa, their uniform supplier I have a problem with ... I actually liked the Rapids Fourth of July kit. So there.

Poison will be performing at the Garden State Arts Center in the coming weeks. I have no interest in going as I only know one Poison song. That said, I do not think VH1 has even done a better Behind the Music. When the lead guitarist balloons to, like, 300 pounds ... classic.

Southside Johnny has braids. The man's got to be close to 60 years old.

Jeff Bradley is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail jeff.bradley@espnmag.com.