They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But this leaves unanswered if that dog can teach himself fresh things, or whether he can extract from the sum of his experiences some useful wisdom with which to perform new trickery.

In the confounding case of the United States men's national team, that dog, with respect, is head coach Jurgen Klinsmann. At 51, he may not be old in the strictest sense of the word, but he's a mere month and a half shy of his fifth anniversary as U.S. head coach. And on those terms, he's been around for eons.

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And for all those years, his tricks were the same. Speak loudly about changing things. Promise real progress. Vow that your team will improve, modernize and play better soccer. Make sweeping reforms off the field and behind the scenes. Tinker endlessly with formations and tactics. Cycle through dozens of players without apparent rhyme or reason.

They were the same tricks he had tried to pull, with very mixed results, at Bayern Munich during his abbreviated stint there for the bulk of the 2008-09 season. He had talked of reform then, too. But the ways big and small in which he tried – for some non-obvious reason – to alter the DNA of an already wildly successful club only led to his ouster before the season was out.

Then again, those same tricks had worked with Germany, when he got an outdated and outmoded national team back on the tracks that would lead to a World Cup title a decade down the line. Granted, that was with a strong assistant who did most of the actual coaching. And in a nation whose team had bombed so badly at Euro 2004 that, even though the initial resistance was fierce, was ripe for reform. Also, a tidal wave of elite young talent was emerging from a revamped academy system that would soon be the world's envy. It allowed him to adopt a friskier playing style.

Showing no signs of any of the things he had promised, Klinsmann's U.S. project seemed to be slowly sinking, pulling his legacy and reputation down along with it. The period from last July through this March was particularly brutal. There was the premature elimination in the Gold Cup semifinals; the extra-time loss to Mexico in the ensuing Confederations Cup playoffs; an actual deficit to puny Saint Vincent and the Grenadines before the Yanks set things right; a meek stalemate in the next World Cup qualifier against Trinidad and Tobago; and a woeful 2-0 loss in Guatemala at the resumption of qualifiers in March.

But at this Copa America Centenario, Klinsmann has invented a new act – one in which he plays a sensible, consistent and measured manager.

View photos Pressure mounted on Klinsmann after a shocking loss at Guatemala. (AP Photo) More

This sudden conversion to reason and conformity came at the 11th hour. Because after a 2-0 loss to a sauntering Colombia in the Americans' opener, a defeat in either of the following games against Costa Rica or Paraguay likely would have not just eliminated them but also ended Klinsmann's time in charge of them. His boss, U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati, made no secret of his expectation that the team advance out of the group stage.

So Klinsmann did something new. He stuck to the same lineup (it was the first time since the 1930 World Cup, in fact, that the USA had left its squad sheet unchanged for three straight games) and more or less kept the same tactics. A tweak from a 4-3-3 to a 4-4-2 formation with the same personnel only made things run more smoothly as it enabled a few more players to take up their ideal roles.

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