There has always been a measure of carefully attuned bluster to Jurgen Klinsmann’s national team approach on a personnel level. As though he was conducting a symphony no one but himself could hear.

He has deployed Michael Bradley in advanced roles because reasons, and he has used Alejandro Bedoya as a defensive midfielder because other reasons, and he has played Jermaine Jones as a center back because reasons you could not fathom, peasant.

Klinsmann isn’t a tinkerer in the sense that all national team coaches are tinkerers. Bob Bradley and Bruce Arena hardly rotated their starting lineups less, which is a product of national team call-ins and matchup scenarios and everything else. National team coaches move in players like moveable parts in an attuned assembly line, the gears clacking into place one after the other.

That was never Klinsmann’s issue, more or less. Everyone tries new pieces to a degree. The problem was re-configuring the entire assembly line between call-ins. So when the old gears rotated back into use, the machine was producing different products and the gear teeth didn’t align. Nothing really ran, except in fitful, rasping gasps.

This is the essential problem with a coach who thinks managers have a minimal tactical role in the architecture of an average match. It doesn’t much matter what he does – with the formation, with the deployment, with the general directives he issues – if the players are ultimately ripping it up and reshaping it all once the whistle blows.

“How can we explain to people in U.S. that soccer is a player-driven game and the decisions are made by the player? Because once the game is rolling, you have barely any influence on it. You have you three subs, a little talk at halftime and you can scream as loud as you want on the sideline, but they can barely hear you. So our challenge is always to tell them you have to take the game into your own hands, you have to drive it.”

There is truth to this of course, but it creates problems on the national team level. When formations change and lineups change and top-down directives are left intentionally vague – something we’ve heard stretching back to his Bayern Munich days – you lose the ability to generate an identity. You lose yourself to gain… something.

That has seemingly changed. Klinsmann started the same lineup – this lineup – in all three Copa America group games. It was not only the first time Klinsmann has done that as USMNT coach. It was the first time any U.S. national team coach had done that in years.

The back eight of that formation is almost literally perfect in the construct of each player’s best use. Fabian Johnson is almost certainly better as a left mid, but his VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) at left back is easily higher than at left mid, where he’d be more involved in the attack. Geoff Cameron and John Brooks, who is probably the most in-form American player on Earth right now, form the best center back duo since probably the days of Berhalter and Pope in the early 2000’s. Bradley is finally playing deeper. Jermaine Jones is in a position that allows him the freedom to be his goofy and sometimes devastatingly effective positional self. And Alejandro Bedoya has been unlocked as a human knitting needle.

The problem is the front three. It’s always been the front three. Clint Dempsey is not a center forward, Gyasi Zardes is not a right winger and Bobby Wood certainly isn’t a left winger. Which is why Klinsmann’s softest, most notable tactical touch in this tournament has nothing to do with the team’s starting formation.

It’s what this thing turns into, like Bruce Banner breaking loose of his clothes a half hour into the match and becoming something more sinister and eminently unstoppable.

Somewhere between the 20-30-minute mark of each match, this happens. The formation becomes a loosely formed 4-4-2, and suddenly everything just… clicks.

This may look like a misshapen mass more than a traditional 4-4-2, but in the construct of the match it’s worked fantastically. Jones, cut loose even of his moorings in the 4-3-3, is given license to roam left-center while Johnson overlaps, filling his more comfortable role higher on the field (watch back Jones’ movement on his goal against Costa Rica and you’ll see this in action). Zardes drops into more of a two-way role, while the central midfield duo of Bradley and Bedoya subtly shifts to an akimbo 1-2 link-up role between the center backs and the dropping second forward that works better than maybe any before it under Klinsmann.

But the real utility – the sun around which this entire switch orbits – is up top. It is in Wood and Dempsey and it is a beautifully subtle move that opened both up to more production. Every goal or assist either has had in the run of play has been out of this construct.

Against Paraguay, about 15 minutes into the match, Klinsmann added a wrinkle by splaying Zardes wide left, thus pushing up Wood as the primary striker with Dempsey off his shoulder. This is what so many have been screaming for, and Klinsmann has inserted it into the match, not into his lineup sheet.

Most of the U.S.’s most dangerous passages out of the back came down the left, as Johnson dove forward as the creative impetus as Jones checked in from center-left to fill his role as the resident what-the-hell chance-taker. With Dempsey ghosting in off Wood’s back shoulder – he routinely flipped from one of Wood’s shoulders to the other – and Bedoya alternating checking in and providing width on the right, this is the most dangerous the U.S. has ever looked over a consistent string of games against non-minnows under Klinsmann.

Ever.

I think there’s a legitimate shout that the U.S. should just bear up and start the 4-4-2 from the jump. It’s certainly the better formation from an attacking standpoint, and it provides more natural width. But there is something to be said for setting the match in a 4-3-3 and switching to something different to give the opposition another look, and at least post-Colombia it’s hard to argue with the results so far.

If you follow the coaching continuum to the opposite pole of ‘micro-manager,’ you’ll still find Klinsmann, the eternal tactical optimist giving the reins and the horse and a mostly blank map to his players. But it’s easy to forget he is capable of pulling these tricks out of his bag, and while most of them are self-evident, some really are shrewd maneuvers.

Klinsmann’s greatest triumph this Copa America is largely his sudden propensity to get out of his own way and mostly just coach within both himself and the pool he’s been given. He has always been an ideological pragmatist. Perhaps as the U.S. dives toward the 2018 World Cup, we’re simply seeing his next phase of tactical evolution: dropping the ideology and following the pragmatic path of his predecessors.

Because the simplest lesson is often the hardest for an ideologue to accept; you ultimately can’t coach the players you don’t have. Arena understood that. Bradley certainly understood that. Maybe Klinsmann is finally getting there too.