We are hardest on the ones we love.

It is an unfortunate consequence that the confluence of expectation and disappointment are so close. I can remember walking into Star Wars: Episode I ruminating on the wider merits of George Lucas’s faithfulness to his own legacy. And then an annoying child the size of a barn door whined uncontrollably for two reductive hours and Jar Jar Binks happened everywhere and I inexorably gripped the paddles on either side of my movie seat, fingers digging into the gum on its underside. It didn’t matter. I’d given up.

I would not have had that reaction to a Twilight movie. I did that on a date once. I expected death, and I received death. Lucas was supposed to deliver me something different. He had a mandate, history, something I respected in his back pocket. And he burned it all down.

I am hardest on Caleb Porter because he rode expectation into MLS and he was its champion. He had an ousia. He was stylistically different. A man set apart. His Akron teams were aspirational. He recruited technicians and wingers and real registas and espoused a style that has birthed three of the 10 best players under the age of 24 currently playing in MLS. When he inevitably leaped to the pros, his 2013 Portland Timbers were so damn watchable. They made the playoffs that year, beat the moneyed Sounders in the Western Conference quarters, got within a hair’s breath of the final only to be stopped by an RSL team of destiny.

Porter was doing something. He was his own.

And then he rushed over the precipice as losses mounted in 2014, as professional coaches sometimes do, eyes bugging like Wil-E-Coyote as he clawed at the air to grant him buoyancy. It is at this moment that the ethos is challenged, and it is at precisely this moment that a coach decides whether his philosophy was a fad or a defining characteristic. Whether he will walk out the door with it or bolt the passageway with someone else’s lock.

Whether it was due to pressure from the Timbers’ notoriously hyper-reactive brass or by his own hackneyed path, Porter chose the latter.

I’m not sad about Porter’s turn because I’m a Timbers fan. I am merely a fan of ideologues, I guess, enough of one that I’d like to see an American become an out-of-the-box one for more than five years. I would like to see again the Porter who developed Death By 1,000 Passes at Akron and bristled at the term because its premise was so self evident. I would like to see someone rise up in his shadow who has this level of conviction to say the following about literally any philosophy.

Klopp: “I believe in a philosophy that is very emotional, very fast and very strong. My teams must play at full throttle.” #KloppLFC — Liverpool FC (@LFC) October 9, 2015

The reason Porter’s fall from stylistic anomaly is so disheartening isn’t because he went back on possession for possession’s sake. It’s because he went back on anything discernible. He was something, and then in the face of adversity he became something neither understandable nor palatable. Portland is now decidedly unwatchable, an over-the-top team that plays disappointing soccer and relies on iso hero ball from Darlington Nagbe and Diego Valeri. It’s like watching the NBA in 2002: one-on-ones while everyone else rotates around a nucleus vibrating hopelessly in its own contained system.

Portland is far from the worst team in the league, but it is hard to stand by Episode I when Episode IV is sitting haughtily in the dusty shelves of your filmography.

So when I say ideology, I don’t mean a singular tactical blanket laid over everything. Not everyone has Pep’s desire for possession or Klopp’s need to run or Wenger’s wont for interchange atop the box or Bielsa’s desire to slip markers on the flanks via the overlap. But those men have those things. They are definable. They have decided that the normal world of soccer bores them and they will be themselves, which is to say they will be wholly different.

The reason Porter is the recipient of more fire than coaches who aren’t nearly as sound, or have accomplished less in a tactical sense, is because he represented the vanguard and went back on it. He was a thing and then became decidedly not a thing, and the gap between there and here is a yawning chasm of sadness that I honestly haven’t had the temerity to digest in full yet. Porter was our golden child. I don’t know what he is now.

On an MLS coaching fantasy draft continuum, there are few coaches I’d take before Porter. Maybe Marsch. Probably Berhalter. Robinson, most likely. Arena for his ethereal pragmatism, which is an ethos of its own. One or two more, perhaps. Porter is still more than worthy of a professional coaching job, and this is not a gong hit for his ouster. But I don’t understand him even as much as I understand coaches I dislike in a tactical sense. Dom Kinnear’s teams play throwback 1970’s American soccer, but I at least know that about him. I dislike most everything about his tactical style, but his style is at least engraved above the entrance to his locker room. It has won him things, even if I wish it hadn’t.

Porter was supposed to be different. He was different. And then he talked about Mourinho and practical soccer and the sky was suddenly a duller shade of blue.

I held – and still hold – Porter to a higher standard. I am naturally quicker to break back on him than other coaches, and you are free to decide whether there is any fairness in that or not. I’m not here to judge that pronouncement. I feel how I feel because I still hold him in such high esteem, still respect his ability and past deeds that much. But what I am saying is that he has made me the saddest of any American soccer coach. And I can’t shake that.

Where I am going with this is that it is difficult to stick with an essence of being as you are when squeezed from the top (your bosses) and the bottom (your exacting fans). It takes an ideology. An ideologue. Something American professional coaching has yet to have in an extended sense.

I know where you are stalking to now, but Jurgen Klinsmann is not a practical ideologue. He is an airline idealist, implementing ideas on a top-down directorship level while his gameday tactics languish in a prior era. He says many things that make sense. His teams do few of them, even against inferior competition.

This is different.

The literal Latin meaning of “substance” is actually reversed in modern English. The interpretation is ‘stood’ (stance) ‘under’ (sub), which was translated through Aristotle for centuries as something that was neither said of nor in any subject. This is an overwhelmingly passive translation, which fits far more with a Platonic ideal than anything Aristotelian. But recent advances in our understanding of what substance actually means in light of its original philosophical terminology leads us to the conclusion that substance is not the process of being under something. It is the process of being. It is who you are. Your ousia. Your essence.

This is where I am. As a coach, you are something. Your essence as a coach is an extension of your substance as a person. Do you value thrift in daily life? Perhaps you should speak to Zeman and temper him with Van Gaal. Are you neurotically obsessed with geometry? Read Cruyff. Do you find Lewis and Clark’s expeditionary force intriguing? May I suggest Chapman?

Be different. Break molds. Raise two pointed fingers to the system and laugh at its inefficiency while you coach around it. But most importantly, be you. There is not enough bold in the world for me to convey that in that way I’d like to.

As Americans, we have been defiantly clutching our 4-4-2s and our win-at-all-costs philosophies and our boring approaches for decades and it is time they burned upon the pyre of personality. If we were all truly our authentic selves as coaches, we’d be unreachable.