Happy Thanksgiving, to those who celebrated. Happy Last Thursday of November, to those who didn’t. Anyway, I slacked off on the emails last week. Here’s everything I’ve written recently:

-What did we learn from a year when the USMNT barely played any competitive games and barely had a full-time coach?

In a vacuum, there are more talented players than [Tyler] Adams in the player pool, but there isn't another player like Adams. Losing a true attacking star like Pulisic would be a massive blow, but Berhalter would just slot in another player at left wing and the team's style of play wouldn't have to change. Without Adams, the U.S. couldn't just drop someone else into the exact same holding midfield role without it all falling apart.

That might still be true, but it wasn't in the Nations League. With a midfield of just Musah and McKennie against Mexico and then a midfield of Musah and Brenden Aaronson against Canada, the USMNT legitimately dominated two other top teams in Concacaf. There's not as much to glean from the matches against the much weaker Trinidad and Tobago in any structural sense. (The big takeaway from those matches: If anyone in the NFL needs a replacement punter, Dest is available.) But there's at least some evidence from this year that the USMNT isn't as reliant on its injury-prone captain as it seemed like it was in Qatar.

-With my colleague Mark Ogden: How have Liverpool and Manchester City evolved since their first title race five years ago? (Bonus: there is video content of me in my parents’ basement sprinkled throughout this piece.)

And with those changes in personnel, pretty much all of those stylistic markers have disappeared. City are creating only 0.9 pullbacks per 90 minutes this season -- just the 10th most in the 20-team Premier League. They're playing 2.7 switches per 90, which is the 12th most in the league. Their pressing rates have plummeted, too: down to 11th in PPDA and 11th in opponent pass-completion percentage.

Despite all of that, they still lead the league in field tilt -- how might you do that if you're not preventing your opponent from getting into your defensive third? You move very slowly once you get the ball into their defensive third.

-And from today: Let us now rank the five most disappointing teams in the Premier League:

[Manchester United’s] performances earlier in the season were so bad, and were accompanied by equally bad results. That's why five wins from sixt still has them in only sixth place. But as the results have improved, the performances have not. The main reason they've won a few games over this recent stretch is that they've played only one team in the top half of the table, and that match was your typical high-profile domination at the hands of Man City in the Manchester Derby.

Perhaps nothing sums up the state of Manchester United at the moment than the fact they've won five of six and no one is really talking about them. That's about to change, though. Their next six matches? At Galatasaray, at Newcastle, Chelsea, Bournemouth, Bayern Munich and at Liverpool. It could get ugly, quickly, again.