If the end really is nigh for Jurgen Klinsmann as U.S. men’s national team head coach, which it may be or very well might not be, after consecutive losses to Mexico at home and Costa Rica away to open the final round of World Cup qualifying, an urgent question has to be posed.

Who would do better than Klinsmann with a short turnaround to the next qualifiers, not to mention the World Cup?

We called for Klinsmann’s dismissal after the utterly rotten 4-0 loss in Costa Rica on Tuesday, which followed the first loss to Mexico in Columbus ever on Friday. So have many other outlets.

After assuring us before the Mexico game that he expected to finish the hexagonal round with the same manager he was starting it with, even U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati – whose reputation is very much staked to Klinsmann’s after a five-year pursuit of the German – was a bit wishy-washy to reporters after the game about whether the coach would be retained.

So who could come in and fix a troubled qualifying campaign – the U.S. is dead last after two games and in legitimate danger of missing out on an eighth straight World Cup, even though three of six teams in the hex qualify directly and a fourth reaches a playoff – and mend what looked for all the world like a broken team down in Costa Rica?

It’s important to consider the time-frame.

If 4½ months until a March 24 home game against Honduras and an away match at Panama four days later sounds like a lot, it really isn’t. Because in international soccer, that time-span represents no more than a small handful of friendlies, if that, and a camp or two. The 2018 World Cup, likewise, is closer than it appears. If 19 months looks like a sea of time, it’s more like a dry brook when you consider that the next manager will only see his team every other month, and seldom longer than for a week.

That would appear to rule out several candidates.

Because much as the idea of having somebody like Peter Vermes, Jason Kreis, Caleb Porter, Oscar Pareja, Gregg Berhalter, Tab Ramos or any of the other promising young and homegrown coaches appeals, those men are builders. They’ve had success. But they’ve largely had it because they were given time to construct a vision and then, day by day, went about the painstaking work of making it materialize. They do it well. But there isn’t time for all of that.

The USA would need someone to mop up. Not to lay a new floor.

Dream-candidate Marcelo Bielsa, an influential Argentine who has consistently produced some of the most innovative and attractive soccer around, is of the same ilk, albeit at a different level. He has reportedly talked to U.S. Soccer in the past, but it’s unlikely that the federation would go for another big-idea manager who wants almost total control. Plus, he very much lives up to his “El Loco” nickname as he appears in the throes of the occasional fit of lunacy. This past summer, he quit Lazio after just two days.

What this job requires, to impose another metaphor on you, is not somebody to take the car down to its chassis and rebuild it part by part, but an expert who can change the oil, realign the tires and drive it better than the last guy. And that rather curbs the list of possibilities.

Here are our favorites.

Bruce Arena

Most of the time the obvious choice is also the best. Good old Bruce is already the towering favorite to replace Klinsmann, should he depart before his second term is up. And, according to reports, machinations have been in the works on this front.

This is a no-brainer. He’s the only U.S. manager to have successfully completed two full World Cup cycles. He oversaw the best modern-day run in 2002, when the Americans were a dubious call away from perhaps making it as far as the semifinals. And while 2006 was a disaster, nobody has the kind of experience Arena does. He knows the players, he knows CONCACAF, he knows the job.

As far as national team managers go, he is as close to plug-and-play as they come.

Dominic Kinnear

This is more of a stretch, as Kinnear has no experience in international management. He does, however, have an exceedingly strong record in Major League Soccer, turning limited teams of modest gifts into winning outfits. Through unshakable organization, strong defense and savvy counter-attacking, his utterly unspectacular Houston Dynamo reached the conference finals four times in seven years, winning MLS Cup twice. And while his San Jose Earthquakes of the last two seasons have been forgettable and poor, respectively, Kinnear is a no-nonsense manager who is popular with players for his straightforward approach.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that he is kind of the anti-Klinsmann, who is a man of words more than actions. Kinnear wouldn’t build a very pretty national team, but chances are good he would get the job done.

Guus Hiddink

This sounds like a long shot, but then the 70-year-old Dutchman is out of work, has a history of taking on smaller World Cup-caliber national teams (like South Korea, Australia, Russia and Turkey) and enjoys a good challenge. In two stints as Chelsea’s interim manager, Hiddink has demonstrated that he can put out a fire, improving the team twice. He isn’t exactly a tactical mastermind, but then that isn’t really necessary when it’s obvious how the U.S. should play. And where he excels is bringing together teams of disparate pieces. Sound useful?

Fun fact: He played in the old North American Soccer League for two seasons in 1978 and 1980.

Bob Bradley

While we’re unabashedly rooting for the first American to manage a Premier League team, things aren’t going super-duper well with Swansea City just yet – although his schedule has also been brutal. Bradley, after all, has an awful deep hole to dig out of there. Regrettable as it would be, there’s a non-zero chance that he’d be available in the coming months before the next round of qualifiers.

Upon his appointment with the Swans, Bradley revealed publicly for the first time he was still annoyed by how his firing from the national team in 2011 – to make room for Klinsmann, of all people – went down. But if he were available and could be tempted to ride in on a white horse, Bradley would surely know just what to do to set things right.

Jesse Marsch

Marsch, like Kinnear, has national team experience as a player. He was also an assistant on Bob Bradley’s staff and has done a strong job with both the Montreal Impact in its expansion season and the New York Red Bulls the last two years. He has won the Supporters’ Shield once, MLS Coach of the Year once and the regular-season Eastern Conference twice. And he’s done it with a team stripped of its stars, turning it into a fluid yet cohesive unit. Given the immediate robustness of his teams, Marsch provides a good fallback option.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.