Bob Bradley, a student of the game

Bob Bradley has always been a student of the coaching game.

He can talk Gregg Popovich, why he thinks the San Antonio Spurs coach has succeeded, and years ago read all the books on Herb Brooks and the 1980 U.S. hockey team. He drove up to Lake Placid on a whim with a couple of Princeton buddies during those Olympics, slept in some basement, figured out how to get into a game.

About the same time, Bradley saw that sports could be his profession. He entered the University of Ohio's sports management program, then did a stint at Virginia as an assistant under Bruce Arena, widely considered the greatest American soccer coach ever.

Bradley describes that setting as something of a laboratory. He traded ideas with other coaches, including a young women's basketball assistant named Geno Auriemma, the future Connecticut coach and Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer. At Princeton, he got to know Pete Carril, the basketball coach, and Bill Tierney, the lacrosse coach, and studied them.

"In every team that I've ever coached, the way to build a team, to put a group together that has an idea of what it's all about, is to be strong and proud of what it means every time you step on the field," Bradley said.

He says those words a lot - strong and proud.

"That's the mark of any successful team," Bradley said. "That is what I've always done as a coach - that is what I believe, what I think I'm good at."

A year after coaching the U.S. team in the World Cup, after signing a new contract to coach through 2014, Bradley was let go as coach. He doesn't hesitate to use the word fired. He was interested in coaching a club team in Europe, but the first intriguing offer came from Egypt.