So it has come to this. After a full 16-game schedule and two playoff rounds whittled the field, the fourth and sixth-best teams in the NFC get to play for a spot in the Super Bowl.
No, it doesn’t make much sense. But we always knew that kind of outcome was likely during an NFL season that took parity to a whole new level.
The Philadelphia Eagles were left for dead when they lost 10-3 to the Redskins on Dec. 21. Yet they somehow recovered to beat Dallas in the regular-season finale and then Minnesota and the New York Giants in the playoffs to reach the NFC title game for the fifth time this decade.
At least the Eagles have been here before. But the Arizona Cardinals? The team that had made the playoffs just twice in 32 years entering the season and had a losing record in 20 of the previous 23?
“Nobody believed this,” said Arizona quarterback Kurt Warner. “Nobody expected this.”
Thanks to a stunning 33-13 win at Carolina on Saturday, the good folks of Phoenix, who have watched their share of wretched football over the years, actually have the chance to see history made in person. The Cardinals have never played in the Super Bowl. They have never even played in the NFC Championship game. The lone whiff of success for this long-suffering franchise was the 1947 NFL title and a runner-up finish the next season — years before the NFL/AFL merger made football the nation’s most popular sport. The opponent in those long-forgotten championship games? The Eagles, of course.
Ironic that a team which struggled so much traveling east — Arizona was 0-5 this year and blown out twice on the East Coast — actually won when it mattered at Carolina, the site of one of those five losses. Arizona was 9-7 — a No. 4 seed thanks to winning the lightly-regarded NFC West, but with the lowest winning percentage of any NFC playoff team.
“We joked about it during the week that we were due,” said Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt. “Maybe we actually were.”
