Change is in the Cards

I love football. I especially love Chiefs football, but given the team’s performance the past few seasons, I have had to change the way I watch the game.

So, I have adopted a couple of other teams as surrogates for which to root during this winter of my discontent (a winter that I trust will soon be over now that we have a new GM and will soon have a new head coach). I have always liked the Green Bay Packers. Those are real football fans up there, and I admire their loyalty to their team through thick and thin. But it was kind of weird watching someone other than Favre at quarterback.

I also like the Chicago Bears and their straight-forward, no holds-barred brand of football. They just line up and hit someone. But as much as I love to see them play defense, their offense has been painful to watch.

Now, if you know anything about football, then you know that rooting for the Packers and the Bears wasn’t much more fun than rooting for the Chiefs this season. So I also found great solace in rooting against a few teams.

For example, I never tire of rooting against the Oakland Raiders, though in recent years they’ve been so bad that it has lost some of its magic. I also love to root against the Denver Broncos, a team that personifies evil, in my humble opinion.

But this coming Sunday, I will find myself rooting for a team that I have never given a second thought to supporting—the Arizona Cardinals. Actually, I have a hard time remembering that they are not the St. Louis Cardinals since that is the name by which I knew them growing up. They didn’t move to Arizona until 1988, and over the past 20 years, their main contribution to the NFL was to look for them on the schedule, assuming that would be counted as a win for whoever the Cardinals played.

But this has been a year of “change”. As if the election of the first African American President wasn’t remarkable enough, along comes the Arizona Cardinals to defy all expectations, beating three other playoff teams, claiming the title of NFC champions and winning the right to take on the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Superbowl.

It’s the story of rags-to-riches. The story of a team that was down-and-out, but which kept working and striving to reach the top. So I’ll be rooting for them and their quarterback, Kurt Warner (who has a great Christian testimony that he’s not shy about sharing). Because such a story gives me hope that a team that has gone 6-26 for the past two seasons might actually compete for more than a high draft pick within the next season or two.

Now that’s change you can believe in.