Brent,

I believe you will find that the sharpening technique you are using looks better perhaps than images that aren't sharpened at all on first glance, but...

The point of the USM tool is to sharpen selectively the image. Using a threshold of 0 in Adobe Photoshop sharpens all the pixels. You can see in the jersey lettering the artifacts that get introduced by this technique. Skin gets badly treated under many lighting conditions by not having some threshold, and even noise reduction won't always fix the color flaws that can occur.

I like to de-blur/de-haze the image when using USM . I first use a amount of around 16-20%, a radius of 40 (yes, 40), and a threshold of 1-3.

Then, I go back and use the Unsharp Mask, and more conventionally sharpen:

Amount 100-150% range (without people and faces or text I will go higer on occaision)
Radius .7-1.1 (1.5 or higher starts to create over big halos in high contrast areas)
Threshold 1-3 (with people) and up to 5 or 6 without people.

I will dig up some examples later this pm.

There are a couple of other sharpening techniques that include tracing edges and a newer one, I'm not really facile with yet, which involves playing with the registration.

The registration is a new technique for me (the print folks and some GD's swear by it for big enlargements). This results in crisper photos than fractals will produce alone.

One other quick note:
As I've done more and more work in the 'digital' and 'web' age, there is a big difference between printed and electronically displayed images as to what works. Light Transmitted vs Light Reflected.

Interesting thread and I look forward to also hearing (I'll not comment on this topic yet) what others consider too much sharpening.