Who'd a Thunk It?

Any NFL fan by now already knows that this year's Super Bowl appears to favor the AFC just a teeny, tiny bit. When Arizona, the unlikeliest of Super Bowl contestants we've seen in a long while, takes on Pittsburgh at Raymond James Stadium in the city of Tampa, FL on 1 February, most people will expect a massacre. As the old saying goes, you sell tickets with offense (Arizona), but win championships with defense (the Steelers).

Ah, but there is a reason why they still play the game. In a single-elimination tournament like the NFL playoffs, any team can have a good day and upset any other team, as we saw last year with the NY Giants beating the supposedly unbeatable NE Patriots. It was one of the mighty Football Outsiders (Aaron Schatz), writing a column for the venerable Worldwide Leader in Sports, who declared the G-men "...one of the worst teams to reach the Super Bowl" last January. I wonder if he'll do a follow-up article on the Cardinals this year?

After all, the Cardinals had one of the lowest win-loss records (9-7) of the teams that made the playoffs, were miserable playing in the Eastern time zone until they upset Carolina at home two Sundays ago, and really didn't start playing even respectable defense until the playoffs. They lost to perhaps the best team to not make the playoffs, those pesky Patriots, 47-7 in a laffer* in week 16 of the regular season. No one predicted Arizona, the number four seed, would be in the NFC Championship game, much less in the Super Bowl, when the playoffs started three weeks ago.

* Should that be written "laugher"? Because that doesn't look right either.

And yet, here they are. In the Super Bowl. With at least a shot at beating the Super Bowl champions from the 2005 season, a team that still has many of the same players, meaning they have veteran leadership that knows how to handle the media intensity leading up to the Big Event.

Franchises making their first-ever appearance in the Super Bowl have not done well throughout the history of the event, winning just six times against 17 losses. Only once did two Super Bowl virgins meet, and that was the 1982 matchup of the 49ers and the Bengals ('82 was when the Super Bowl was played, at the end of the '81 NFL season).

The sportscasters covering yesterday's playoff game mentioned a little bit of Super Bowl trivia: according to them (and this was an unsanctioned trivia question, so no graphics appeared to support it), only four franchises have never made it to the Super Bowl, now that Arizona has made it to the Big Event. They ticked off the Detroit Lions, the NO Saints, the Cleveland Browns, and the Houston Texans. However, I think they missed a fifth franchise, the Jacksonvile Jaguars. As near as I can tell, those are the only franchises in the modern NFL that have never competed in the Super Bowl.

I also learned today that the Super Bowl shares some history with such events as the Las Vegas Marathon, the Montreux Jazz Festival, the Consumer Electronics Show, the Smithsonian Kite Festival, and the Tour de Bretagne Cycliste in cycling. What do they all have in common? They were all started in 1967.

Just a little trivia for your Monday reading pleasure.