Super time baby

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LAS VEGAS — The guys in the back rooms who make the numbers seem a bit confused by this one, though they're hardly alone. The Arizona Cardinals haven't made it easy for anyone in their improbable run to the Super Bowl.

The Cardinals will be underdogs against the Pittsburgh Steelers, that much is certain in the sports books that line the Las Vegas Strip. No surprise there, because Arizona has been the dog in all three of its playoff games after sputtering badly late in the regular season.

The NFL will have you believe it doesn't matter because there is no such thing as a connection between the league's popularity and the ease with which you can bet on a game. The league and the television talking heads who understand what side their bread is buttered on will pretend that there is no such thing as a point spread on the biggest game of the year.

That's nonsense, of course, because hundreds of millions of dollars will change hands on everything from the opening coin flip to the eventual final score. Millions of Americans will have a financial stake in the game, whether they wager online, in a Vegas sports book or simply buy a square or two in the pool at their local bar.

I don't bet on sports, mostly because I'm lousy at picking winners, but a friend of mine risked five bucks in August on a 50-1 shot that the Cardinals will win the Super Bowl. Those odds weren't bad, but bookies thought so little of Arizona that even when the Cardinals made the playoffs you could still get 35-1 on them winning it all.

Fortunately for the bookies, my friend's bet was about the norm. Bettors didn't wager serious money on the Cardinals, even at longshot odds, because they had no idea going into the playoffs that Kurt Warner would play like he did earlier in the season, Edgerrin James would get a chance to run the ball, and Larry Fitzgerald would stake his claim as the best wide receiver in the league.

That combination, along with an underrated defence, was good enough to win three playoff games and get the Cardinals in the Super Bowl for the first time in their history. And what a miserable history it has been, stretching from the team's formation in 1898 in Chicago to its current location in Phoenix, where before this year the Cardinals had one winning season in 21 years.

There was never any reason to believe Arizona could actually make it to the Super Bowl. History shows that perennially bad teams tend to revert to doing bad things (see Chicago Cubs) when the pressure is on because they don't know how do anything different.

College Football racist against blacks

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The Black Coaches Association Hiring Report Card came out this month, and when it comes to hiring black head coaches, big-time college football gets a big-time "F."

There are 117 colleges participating in Division I-A football and there are only three black head coaches. You don't have to be too smart to know how stupid this looks.
Let me lay it out for you:

Fifty percent black athletes leads to 25 percent black assistant coaches leads to 3 percent black head coaches.

Fifty percent white athletes leads to 75 percent white assistant coaches leads to 97 percent white head coaches.

A profession that so desperately seeks a level playing field offers nothing close to one for the black athlete who aspires to rise to the pinnacle of the college coaching profession.

Plainly and simply, folks, this is discrimination. More precisely this is one of the last and greatest bastions of discrimination within all of American sports.

In college football, we are winning games, building programs and making millions of dollars with the sweat and blood of African-American athletes. I should know. In the last dozen years, my family alone has made more than $30 million as Division I-A head football coaches.