The Sports Bizzo

By Jon…

I once had a friend who believed in conspiracy theories. He had a theory for everything. Everything was a conspiracy. Nothing was what it seemed. The few control the many, he would say. And to some extent, I kind of believed him. Business makes the world go round. People do shitty things to other people to get what they want. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, you know.

But as with any conspiracy nut, some of their theories are just downright retarded. And they’re always the last to know or the hardest to convince.

I bring this up because one of his theories is being disproved as we speak.

The Arizona Cardinals are not only playing in an NFC Championship Game, they’re hosting the son of a bitch.

You can’t write this stuff, I swear.

The Arizona desert has probably seen more Super Bowls than the Cowboys, Steelers, and 49ers combined, but never because they actually had a team involved. They have kick ass weather in January (and, inexplicably, February these days) and their team has always been so abysmal, that the League never had to worry about that awful accident where the Super Bowl host also fielded a Super Bowl team.

The Cardinals have always been a joke. In fact, the Cards “Quarterback of the Future” Matt Leinart was actually dumped on pretty hard for staying in college another year and getting drafted by the Cards, rather than come out after a national championship and Heisman year and being drafted by the 49ers. Actually, a lot of the grumbling was about how much money he lost by waiting, but still. The 49ers are down, but they are a storied franchise with a lineage of great Quarterbacks. The Cardinals have a history of what?

Hosting Super Bowls?

But if you take a good luck at the Cardinals team and the season they’ve had, maybe we should have seen this coming.

They have an aging quarterback in Warner who has spent his entire career as an out of nowhere success story and perennial underdog. He rose to the top with the Rams, fell from grace with a number of other teams, and then the Cardinals gave up on him when they drafted Leinart.

So they’ve got that going for them. The, as Bill Simmons would call it, “no one believed in us potential”

They’ve drafted smartly over the last few years, picking up Boldin, Fitzgerald, and surprise RB Tim Hightower.

But I think the smartest thing they did was hire Ken Whisenhunt. The Cards have always had bad coaches. But Whisenhunt, though unproven as a head coach, has a good pedigree. He came to the Cards from Pittsburgh, where he coached under Bill Cowher. Pittsburgh has always prided itself on being a blue collar team from a blue collar town, and Cowher embodied all of that.

By coaching under Cowher, Whisenhunt learned how to win, and he brought that blue collar mentality with him to the desert….

Either that, or my friend’s Prophecy of The Birdpeople was right. When the year struck 2009, and America was at its weakest economically, The Birdpeople would send a transmission from on high, down to the pathetic Earthlings. A perennial loser from a state that I often times forget exists since the NFL Divisional realignment, would rise to the top of the football world by systematically dismantling all other teams with bird names in the league, starting with the Seahawks in the regular season, the Falcons in the first round, the Eagles in the NFC Championship game, and the Ravens in the Super Bowl. During the post-game press conference, Whisenhunt will remove his people suit, and reveal his true self. He’s a 9 foot bird who breathes fire and sells Lay’s potato chips. He will then reveal that the Cards Super Bowl run was simply a ruse, paid for by Frito-Lay, to unveil the newest taste in the Flavor Spectrum.

You wanna know what the new flavor is, don’t you?

Guess you’ll just have to watch and see…