The U.S. men’s national team is out of the 2026 World Cup, and the postmortem isn’t pretty. Belgium physically dominated them, and now everyone with a microphone has an opinion on what went wrong. Colin Cowherd’s take? The Americans just aren’t big enough, and he used one of the NFL’s most unstoppable athletes to make the point.
“Pulisic is fragile, that is not debatable,” Cowherd said on his show. “We are a big country and an athletic country. I think we are fast, I think we are athletic, we are not terribly big, and I think that hurts us on the back end. The Belgian striker, at 6-foot-4, looked monstrous. What would Erling Haaland look like against us? Gronk against a junior high. We need some size.”
The comparison is blunt but it lands. Haaland is 6-foot-4 and built like a power forward. Rob Gronkowski was 6-foot-6 and 265 pounds of controlled violence. The USMNT doesn’t have anyone who fits that physical profile, and it showed against a Belgian side that bullied them in the box and won every 50-50 ball. Cowherd didn’t stop at the size critique either. He pointed out that elite teams check multiple boxes — size, tactical discipline, finishing — and the U.S. typically checks one or two at best.
Now, this isn’t a new complaint. People have been saying the USMNT lacks a true physical presence for years. But hearing it after a home World Cup elimination stings differently. The Americans had the crowd, the energy, and a favorable draw on paper. None of it mattered when Belgium’s center forward could hold off two defenders and slot the ball past the keeper.
Cowherd also threw out Weston McKinnie and Folarin Balogun as potential leaders, but neither has consistently delivered in big moments. McKinnie can be a wrecking ball in midfield when he’s locked in, and Balogun has the skill set to be a handful. But reliable? That word carries a lot of weight, and the USMNT hasn’t found a player who wears it comfortably since maybe Clint Dempsey hung up his boots.
The next chance to see what this team can do at a high level comes at the 2028 Copa America. That’s two years from now. Plenty of time for young players to develop, for a new coach to build a system, and for the roster to look different. But size isn’t something you coach into a guy. It’s either in your gene pool or it’s not, and right now the pool looks shallow.
If the USMNT wants to stop getting pushed around, they need more than technical ability. They need athletes who can make Haaland look like a normal-sized problem instead of an impossible one. Cowherd’s Gronk analogy might be over the top, but the underlying point is hard to argue: the U.S. hasn’t figured out how to match up physically with the world’s best, and until it does, the results won’t change.
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