U.S. not expected to get any love in World Cup draw

	Bruce Arena doesn't expect the U.S. to get a seed at next year's World Cup, but he doesn't believe Mexico deserves one, either. Julian Finney/Getty Images

How big is the World Cup 2006 draw next Friday? (ESPN2, 3 p.m. ET.)

Putting it in hoops terms, I like to say it's the NCAA tournament's Selection Sunday times four. (The draw to determine the World Cup's first-round matchups only happens once every four years, after all.) But when it comes to the number of souls tuning in around the world, it's probably more accurate to call the festivities in Leipzig, Germany, Selection Sunday times 500.

Yet the draw (co-hosted by former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Heidi Klum!) is not nearly as equitable as the NCAA tournament process. Which is to say that the U.S. could end up in a terrifying four-team group (with, say, Brazil, Holland and the Czech Republic), or a comparatively easy group (like Spain, Poland and Saudi Arabia), or, more likely, something in-between.

As for U.S. head coach Bruce Arena, he's going to Leipzig with one thought in mind. "All the groups are going to be hard, and there are no givens," he says. "The last time around the easy games were China and Saudi Arabia. This time around you'd probably say Australia and Trinidad & Tobago are the weak ones. But Australia has basically all its players in Europe, and Trinidad has a guy [Dwight Yorke] who was once arguably the top striker in soccer."

The main reason for the wide variance in draw possibilities is simple: FIFA only designates eight top seeds (one for each group) and organizes the remaining three draw pots by geography to ensure a mix of teams by continents. The criteria for determining the eight top seeds isn't known yet -- the formula will emerge from one of FIFA's smoke-filled rooms on Tuesday -- but if it's the same formula that FIFA used for the '02 Cup (which uses the controversial FIFA computer rankings and performances in the past three World Cups), these would be the eight seeded teams:

POT 1

Germany (host), Brazil, Spain, Mexico, England, Italy, Argentina, France.

In case you're wondering, the U.S. -- currently No. 8 in the computer rankings -- is two spots from being seeded according to the 2002 guidelines (right behind Holland).

Arena doesn't think the U.S. will get a seed next week no matter how the criteria works, but he also doesn't see how archrival Mexico deserves one either.

"If you're going to seed a CONCACAF team, why wouldn't the U.S. be seeded ahead of Mexico?" he says. "If you're going to tell me that Mexico did something better in 1998, who cares? That's irrelevant. No one can argue to me that 1994 and 1998 mean anything. It's unbelievable if that's the criteria they use, that nobody has put up their hand and said: Does this make any sense?

"I'm not saying we deserve a seed, but we'd definitely deserve to be ahead of Mexico. There's so much there to prove that. But that won't work, and I know that."

At the risk of turning my mock draw into a mockery of a mock draw, here's one semi-educated guess as to how the pots might be filled: