You may want to consider adding the rest of the MLS season.
1) it is during the downtime of the EPL and other European leagues so it gives you year-round content so users don't drift away.
2) you can have some fixtures to test your site with right now while you are trying to get some activity going and iron out the usability and the bugs
anyway, good luck
The tags do disappear (like Digg I believe), but they are used for the search function. So when you do search (upper right corner) you search by tags. Also, the tags come into play when finding the 3 similar articles for each link.
But the tags themselves are hidden away to reduce the clutter.
To make a bet, there needs to be a live match going on. There are no live matches right now so there's nothing to bet. Come September when the seasons start up there will be matches. Basically you follow the "Fixtures" link the navigation and you'll see a list of matches. Then you can go view a fixtures details and there will be a simple form you can use to submit your bets.
Edit: http://www.fanstate.com/main/search?query=YOURQUERY is the search function Better to just use the form.