Super Bowl of steaming dog poo

Pardon me if I'm not excited about the Arizona Cardinals going to the Super Bowl. This is a team deliberately from nowhere. It doesn't have the city's name. This is more than a matter of Phoenician pride. Cities are the competitive players of the 21st century, and if the sun-addled residents of the Salt River Valley don't even know their city name — and what a magical name it is — it's one more indication of how unprepared the region is for the future. Hell, call them the Glendale Cardinals — except they don't really even play in Glendale, a place so amorphous that it lacks an "in."

The team plays in a stadium plopped into a cotton field. The stadium was built with taxpayer money as part of a land deal to enable sprawl development and enrich sprawl developers. It's virtually inaccessible by mass transit. In other words, here's a team that embodies everything that's wrong with metro Phoenix. As for taking the name "Arizona," the Cards sound like a college team — and to the rest of Arizona Phoenix is an expanding cancer, ruining what's left of a once magical place. Go Steelers!

Sweet irony: As the network searches for lead-in shots — which in real cities show shimmering skylines by downtown stadiums — they will be left to show endless crapola subdivisions creeping into the fields, the "deliverables" financed by Wall Street swindles that caused the recession now hammering the NFL.