Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl-- No Fluke

In response to Charles P. Pierce’s razing of the Arizona Cardinals in The Slate this morning, I offer the following counterargument:

It is not a fluke or a disgrace that the Cardinals are in the Super Bowl.  Ex-Jets and Ex-Chiefs head coach Herman Edwards famously said,  “We play to win the game.” And that’s what the Cardinals did.  That’s what the Dallas Cowboys,  Atlanta Falcons,  Carolina Panthers, and Philadelphia Eagles all failed to do.

Win and you advance, lose and you go home.  Those are the rules. (Makes you wish we had rules that simple on Wall Street.)  Do I think that the Cardinals are the most talented team?  No, of course not.  But they win when it matters.  Tony Romo doesn’t win when it matters.  It took Peyton Manning years to win when it mattered.  Go ask Belichick and Brady if they’d trade last year’s Super Bowl loss for a 4th Lombardi Trophy and a 15-1 record.  I think so.  Yes the NFC West is a lousy division, hardly worth of the name.  The Cardinals won a golden ticket to the playoffs,  played out of their minds in those three games,  and got to the top of heap in their conference.
But Pierce says that,

The Cardinals are a glorified Arena Football League team with a soft defense and a running game unworthy of the name. They are in the position that they’re in because the NFL rigs its season worse than any carny rigs his wheel. For all the macho posturing of its principal propagandists, between the jiggering of the schedule and the conniving of the draft and the socialistic revenue schemes, and the desperate grab for any mechanism that will flatten out the differences between really good teams and really bad ones, the NFL is the league that comes closest to the biddy soccer league philosophy of making sure that everyone gets a trophy.

But look they won their games with their “with a soft defense and a running game unworthy of the name.”   They beat the “better” and more experienced teams.  We don’t like sports because of the “better” team, we want to see the “best” and for the ’08-’09 season the best teams are the Arizona Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Steelers.  That’s why they are going to Tampa for the Super Bowl.   If you want to talk about everyone getting a trophy you only have to look at the ridiculous college football system of bowls and the BCS.

There’s no rigging in the NFL schedule, there are too many variables– weather, injuries, officiating, prima donna wide receivers, etc.  Honestly, the league schedulers conspired to have back-to-back seasons where we get the 1-15 Dolphins and the 0-16 Lions?  And thanks to the draft and the revenue sharing, the NFL’s parity makes it America’s most popular sport.  (Don’t get me started on NASCAR and MLB, yes NASCAR has greater event attendance records, and MLB has more games played– but its the TV ratings and ad dollars that matter most.  The simple fact is that the NFL playoffs consistently outdeliver and command more ad dollars than MLB World Series or the Sprint Cup Series).

I grant you that this week is going to be awful, as sportswriters try to spin the story of the Arizona Cardinals and conflate it into a Dickensian struggle against the odds– but that’s what sportwriters get paid to do.  There were 256 regular season games in the NFL,  and ESPN and other sportswriters chronicled each one–opining about adult millionaires in the act of throwing, catching, running, and assaulting other human beings over the possession of a leather ball.  Its absurd, but its what passes for entertainment and sport in our polite society.