Can we just pretend that first game didn't happen?
If Saturday's 6–1 win over New Zealand had been the United States women's first game at these Olympics, rumors of their untimely demise would have been much quieter. It wasn't a perfect performance, but it was a massive improvement over the team's miserable loss to Sweden earlier this week—and in any case, the only fans in the world who would expect a perfect match midway through the group stage in a tournament are American ones.
Of course, the difficulty in evaluating a victory over an opponent such as New Zealand, which looked hapless, is teasing apart how much came down to one team being good and the other team being bad—and it's hard to overstate how limp-wristed an opposition the Football Ferns mounted.