The Quest for the Ring Express Version: Who Really Won Super Bowl 43, and the Top Reason Why the NBA Playoffs are Better Than the NFL Playoffs

The number one reason why the NBA playoffs are better than the NBA playoffs is that the NBA has best of seven series while the NFL has single game series. In the NFL, every play in every playoff game is far more important than individual plays in basketball playoffs. This makes NFL playoffs more exciting to watch and, sure enough, the NFL gets more viewers than the NBA, but it also means that if an NFL team has the misfortune of a really, really bad play, it can cost them the entire playoff "series" even if overall they were the better team. But in the NBA, the truly better team will win four games before the lessor team does almost all of the time.

Ordinarily, the only exception in the NBA would be where the teams are closely matched. In that case, it's possible that the lessor team might win two or three close games in the best of seven, lose three games by 10 or more points, but win the best of seven series overall. George Karl can dream and be as delusional as he wants, but whoever is the better team is going to win the Nuggets' playoff series, and the Nuggets are not going to be the better team.

Now you look at the official box score for Super Bowl 43 and you tell me who the better team was. As you can see as you go down the huge amount of data showing in the box score, it was the Arizona Cardinals who were actually the better team, but they lost the Super Bowl because of one, single, solitary play. At the very end of the first half, with Kurt Warner and the Cardinals offense in a hurry to score from just a few yards out, Warner threw into the arms of James Harrison, who rumbled about 100 yards down the field past numerous stunned "defenders" who were of course normally offensive players.

So Arizona lost the game because their offensive players could not make a defensive play, which means they lost for a stupid fluke reason. And the Arizona Cardinals lost while trying to win with offense. That can be a real no no in football, whereas in basketball teams can and have won with an offensive focus while maintaining a decent defense, for example, the Chicago Bulls in the 90's.

The problem with football is that a single, fortunate defensive play can trump a great offense. The Harrison 100 yards return for a touchdown is the perfect, ultimate example: one single fluke play was enough to offset the fairly big advantage for Arizona over Pittsburgh offensively. Pittsburgh supposedly has this awesome defense, but the fact is that it was no match for Kurt Warner, Larry Fitzgerald, and the rest of the Arizona offense. Pittsburgh's defense won the game on that one fluke play, which is cheap and unfair to me, speaking as an observer and would be fan. So I'm not going to be a fan of football, and this is one big reason I'm not.

Arizona might have won the game anyway, having all but dismantled the Steeler's supposedly unbreakable defense to take a 23-20 lead with two minutes and change to go. But Pittsburgh QB Ben Roethlisberger, who is a great quarterback under time pressure, scrambled the Steelers' offense down the field in a "two minute drill" with, you guessed it, two minutes and change left in the game. Roethlisberger threw an extremely accurate strike to Santonio Holmes into the extreme corner of the end zone, and the Steelers made the go ahead touchdown with 48 seconds left, despite not one or two but three Cardinals defenders being on Holmes at the time.

The Cardinals had too many defenders on Holmes on that play; they were undoubtedly slowed down just a little by having to avoid running in to each other, just enough so that they lost a step on Holmes. So much for the ideas that the more defense the merrier or that defense always trumps offense. So Super Bowl 43 was won by a team playing good offense (Pittsburgh) over a team playing even better offense (Arizona) due to a fluke defensive play. If you don't count the fluke plays, defense does not always win in the NFL. But if you do count the fluke plays, the overall "defense" generally does win, unless one team has a huge offensive advantage. It's the flukes I don't like; I could put up with the relatively small bias in favor of defense in general.

I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of one or two plays being more important than all of the plays combined together. So I'll stay with the NBA, where all of the plays combined decide things.

The different organization of teams is another reason I prefer basketball over football. In football, a player is either an offensive player or a defensive player, while in basketball, all players are responsible for both. There are also "special teams" on NFL teams. But what's so special about teams that play in only a handful of plays a game? So NFL teams are actually several teams instead of just one unified team, whereas NBA teams are completely and truly unified. I prefer the unified for several reasons, first of which is that no player can ever blame what happens to his team on a squad that he is not even a part of.

This is the second time in recent years that Arizona has been cheated out of a National Championship. They were cheated by the massive ego and sensitivity of David Stern, who threw the book at the Phoenix Suns in their 2007 playoff showdown with the San Antonio Spurs, clearly costing them the West Finals Series, and the opportunity to meet the one dimensional, LeBron James all the time, Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Championship, where they most likely would have won.

There’s an exception to the rule that the best team wins in the NBA playoffs for you: if David Stern and his henchmen get involved, all bets are off.

Shortly thereafter, the Suns ended any chance they would win an NBA ring any time soon by trading Shawn Marion and Marcus Banks for Shaquille O’Neal, and by getting rid of their Coach for insufficient reasons. They haven’t been the same since; confusion has been the main theme in Phoenix since then. And now they are facing losing out to some secondary franchise team such as the Denver Nuggets for the 8th slot in the West playoffs.

There are many thousands in Phoenix who stopped being fans of the NBA after Stern’s rampage. I met some of them and petitioned the NBA along with them for relief from the draconian penalty of not allowing Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw to play in a critical game in Phoenix, when all they did was wander a few inches or feet out on to the court after Steve Nash had been tackled by Robert Horry in what was almost certainly a pre-planned ploy by the Spurs.

Like me, all they wanted was a sport where the best team always wins.

So being kind of a perfectionist and a contrary type (who else has refused to call the Nuggets a success despite their great record so far this season?) I am declaring the Cardinals to be the real winners of Super Bowl 43. Congratulations to Kurt Warner, Larry Fitzgerald, and the rest of the Cardinals, for winning your first super Bowl! You played the way football should be played, and used to be played when it was more exciting, in the 1970's and some of the 1980's. And you won the Super Bowl if the truth were told.

KURT WARNER