Super Bowl 43 preview
10 random things about the Super Bowl.
The Steelers are defensive beasts with a pedigree and a quarterback. The Cardinals -- well, they have a quarterback too......
1. Sunday's game is a classic match up of a historically successful, old-school franchise with a chance to become the all-time leader in Super Bowl victories, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and ... the Arizona Cardinals.
2. The Cardinals can't win. The Steelers are better at everything it's possible for a football team to be better at, with one or two exceptions. The Steelers are favored by a touchdown, and that seems generous to our friends from the desert. Anyone who picks the Cardinals is just dreaming.
3. The Cardinals also couldn't win three straight playoff games to get to the Super Bowl. This was a team that only went 9-7 after being spotted a 6-0 record against its own pathetic division mates, the St. Louis Rams, San Francisco 49Er's and Seattle Seahawks. The Cardinals lost four times by three touchdowns or more, and three of those came in the last five weeks of the season.
4. This column is picking the Cardinals. So, I'm dreaming.
5. Times are hard, and we all need something to believe in. I believe this preposterous run the Cardinals are on is going to last one more game. I believe the Steelers' superior talent, brilliant coaching and near-home-field advantage, Steelers fans having braved the recession to make their way to Tampa in far greater numbers than Cardinals fans, will not matter nearly so much as a funny bounce or two and a couple of spectacular catches by Larry Fitzgerald.
6. Fitzgerald is one of the things the Cardinals do better than the Steelers. He does what he does -- catch passes -- better than anybody in the game right now. The Steelers have some pretty good receivers, most notably speedy Santonio Holmes and rugged Hines Ward, but there's nobody like Fitzgerald. If the ball's in the air and Fitzgerald is anywhere near where it's going to come down, he's going to catch it.
7. Ward has been one of the stories of the hype period, whether he'll play on the knee he twisted in the AFC Championship Game. Of course he'll play. Everybody will play. Having your team make the Super Bowl is the greatest advancement in health care since the discovery of germs.
8. Quarterback is another thing the Cardinals do better, though Pittsburgh's Ben Roethlisberger is A) no slouch and B) the guy with the better future. But 37-year-old retread Kurt Warner, written off years ago by some fools, toting his memories and his brittle right hand from St. Louis to New York to Phoenix, cut by the Rams and Giants, benched by the Rams, Giants and Cardinals, inserted into the starting lineup in Week 1 by Arizona coach Ken Whisenhunt, has recaptured his turn-of-the-century glory, something that can't be said for the train of thought in this sentence, and added a triumphant third act to one of the great stories in football history.
9. When the Steelers started winning in the early '70s, they were a lot like the Cardinals, a sad-sack franchise, an afterthought. The best thing the Cardinals had ever done was dither so long over where to move from Chicago in the late '50s that the AFL decided to be born in the meantime and the Cards ended up in St. Louis, which was something like their fourth choice. The best thing the Steelers had ever done was form one of the NFL's early cheerleader squads in 1961.
10. The Cardinals won the 1947 NFL title and lost in the Championship Game the next year. The Steelers lost the first playoff game in their history to the Philadelphia Eagles in 1947. As of the start of the 1972 season, neither team had been back to the postseason since.
Cardinals 38, Steelers 34.