Laughing in the face of a loss or why reporters get a bad rap

There is no perfect season. There is no "right" way.

In every season, there will be games where the team is flat. It always happens.

Unless there is some serious OCD going on, when your team gets hot, enjoy it.

That same season, the Steelers won a late game on a disputed call that forced the Ravens to travel to Pittsburgh for that great Polumalu game. You cannot discard a season because it did not go the way you wanted it to go.

The Cards paid their penance for the losses by traveling to Carolina when they could have hosted that game.

 

Damn ... I can't figure out if Nighthawk is serious or not.

If the Chiefs make the Super Bowl this year, or next year, or fuck, in my LIFETIME ... I really don't know what I would do. I've never experienced it. If the Chiefs do as an 8-8 regular season team, I will still find the nearest goal post and tear it down.

 

Nighthawk,

I think you have a really, really rosy view of those losing Cardinals teams. Yeah, Dave McGinnis was a really nice guy... but those were dogshit teams who couldn't quit fast enough.

I don't know if it's youth, or a romanticizing of rooting for a loser, or what, that's coloring your bizarre view on this... but the Cardinals teams pre-Whisenhunt and Warner were awful and had no heart whatsoever. If that Super Bowl team quit in 4 games it's at least 6 fewer than any other season that came before it.

 

Not true. Those teams rarely quit. They just sucked royally. They had plenty of heart, but next to no talent. That's why the Cardinals got beat and beat repeatedly, they were consistently overmatched by their opponent. That some games ended up wins was pure heart, but heart with no talent will get you to 4-12 most years. Actually, the fact that McGinnis squeezed four out of his last team was a miracle.

The quitting didn't come until the end of the Green era, and it started from Day 1 of the Whisenhunt reign. That's why I've been so disgusted with Whisenhunt, and if we canned him, I wouldn't be at all upset.

Serious as a heart attack. If anyone tries to tell me I've seen a Super Bowl, I tell them they're wrong, because I've never seen my team in the Super Bowl. That's a true statement, because those were not my Cardinals in 2008. That team is something I have no interest in claiming, now or ever.

Oh, give me a break. What about the Atlanta and Philadelphia games that the Cardinals got to host despite having the poorer record? That's not paying their penance, that's getting undeserved help. Maybe, if the NFL had forced the Cardinals to play at Atlanta and at Philadelphia the way they should have, I could accept it. Maybe.

Two undeserved home games only added to my anger. All of it just sucked.

There is a right way, and I've seen it. The Cardinals gave it to me last year. When they lost, it was because they either made mistakes or because the other team was just better. Not once was it lack of effort, unless you count resting the starters in the final game of the regular season. That's the right way.

I know deep down it happened, but I'm happier discarding that season. I don't want any part of that year or that team. In my book, the Cardinals' 2008 season reads: 8-7, missed playoffs.

Accurate? No. Does it make me feel better? Absolutely.

 

Of course. The millions of people who tuned in for the Republic's press run would demand it. The Tucson Citizen would score a decisive victory that day, and all those people wearing Republic jerseys would be irate that Somers sloughed off and that they weren't going to be able to catch the Seattle Times in the yearly race for best newspaper. Everyone would be e-mailing or tweeting Derek Anderson to ask "Did you see that shit Somers pulled?"

Totally and completely the same situation.

 

So then let's just admit that there was absolutely nothing unusual about Anderson and a teammate sharing a joke on the sideline except that a camera happened to be on them.

 

The whole thing blew up b/c DA went complete bitch in the presser.

 

DA going postal in the presser does seem to be the key here.

 

I agree. Anderson had the chance to diffuse the issue and instead exploded.

 

C'mon, man. I was around for these teams. They had no heart at all. Those teams were filled with guys half-assing it for a paycheck. It was a terribly run franchise with shitty players who just didn't care. They weren't "Lovable Losers" on any level. They just sucked.

Everybody liked Dave McGinnis. He was a great guy in a bad situation. But don't pretend that era was somehow morally superior to the Whisenhunt era. Whisenhunt's teams are inconsistent. McGinnis and Green's teams were consistently awful. I'll take inconsistent.

 

I agree they sucked, but I'm not going to agree that they had no heart. If they had no heart, nobody would have cared about the 2008 Lions because the Cardinals would have beaten them to it.

It was a terribly run franchise with lousy players, but they did at least play hard. They didn't play anything close to well, but they played hard.

McGinnis' teams were consistently awful, but consistently played with heart. Whisenhunt's teams are inconsistent on both. Green was the worst of both worlds.

Given the choice of the three, I'll take McGinnis. I was never embarrassed to be a Cardinals fan before Ken Whisenhunt came to town.

To be fair, Green probably would have reached embarrassment levels if he wasn't such a joke that I just found it funny. What should have been the embarrassment of losing to the Bears in the Monday night meltdown wasn't because even though the Cardinals led 23-3 with 12 minutes left, I knew the Bears were going to win. Green had become such a joke that it never even crossed my mind that the Cardinals might actually win, and they were up by 20.

So saying he's the first to embarrass me isn't completely fair to Whisenhunt. But Dave McGinnis never came close to making it as embarrassing for me to be a Cards fan as Whisenhunt did. As I've said, I went six weeks without wearing anything Cardinals, from the loss to the Patriots to the day after the season ended. I was too humiliated.

 

It's not for me to tell you how you should feel about the Super Bowl run, and you're right, games like that Patriots loss were embarrassing. But to say Whisenhunt deserves all the blame for that quit job, and none of the credit for getting that team back on track for the playoff run is a little silly. Did they beat a murderer's row of the best NFL teams ever? No, but that's not an indictment on Whisenhunt as a coach, either.

It's awfully convenient to write off the whole Dave McGinnis era as a team that played hard every time out, and when they were blown out, it's only because of how overmatched they were. It's more than convenient, it's revisionist history at its finest.

I agree that McGinnis had them playing harder than many coaches before them did (at times), but to say that his teams never quit is just flat wrong. A look through Pro Football Reference.com shows some telling losses suffered by McGinnis-coached teams. Do you say all of these losses were because of the disparity in the talent levels?

44-6 at 5-11 Cleveland
38-0 at home to Seattle
28-3 at 7-9 Chicago
50-14 at 7-9 San Francisco
49-0 at 8-8 Kansas City
37-7 at 9-7 Denver
27-6 at home to 7-9 Seattle
34-9 at Philadelphia
31-7 at home to Giants
44-10 at 7-9 Jacksonville

I've been a Cardinals fan since the Jim Hart and Jim Otis days of the 1970s. I've seen a lot of Cardinals teams just flat quit on games and quit on seasons. But the quitting you say you saw in 2008 is not even a blip on the radar when it comes to the biggest quit jobs turned in during this franchise's history, and that includes the tenure of suddenly-legendary coach Dave McGinnis.