Where have you gone, FJM?

For, Mike Celizic has returned! And he has returned in time to write about the NFL playoffs. While the Fire Joe Morgan guys usually stayed away from the football writing in lieu of commenting on baseball-centric articles, I am just the opposite. I am an NFL fan first and foremost. And so I will once again blatantly rip off their style to keep myself from committing some sort of figurative ritual Seppuku triggered by reading a Celizic article.

Give Cards credit for pulling off Super surprise

Arizona thriving as underdog — because no one foresaw this NFC title

Starting off strong, Celizic...they are thriving as underdog...because no one foresaw this NFC title. That's vintage Celizic. You can see it in his past titles, such as:

"Scott Peterson convicted murderer - because he killed wife on fishing trip"

"Barack Obama taking Presidential oath - because he was elected to that office"

"Neighbor accused of child molestation - because he drives a Ford Econoline van. And molests children in it"





There aren’t enough crows in the world for all the humble pies that all of us in the expert analysis business are going to have to eat.

If you are familiar with FJM's reamings of Celizic, you will know that they spawned an entire "food metaphor" culture. A staple of the Celizic diet. HA!



And there aren’t enough words in Webster’s lexicon to give sufficient credit to the Arizona Cardinals for what they did Sunday against the Philadelphia Eagles.

No, because words such as "overcame a 3.5 point spread to win NFC title game at home" and "division champion team overcomes odds to beat 9-6-1 squad who barely snuck into the playoffs and played maybe 5 good games all year" just don't do the Cardinals justice in this situation.




I’m not sure the sentence exists that was less likely to be written than that one. Until Sunday, I would have been less surprised to read, “Lasting peace comes to the Middle East,” “Ann Coulter endorses Hillary Clinton for President,” “Keith Olbermann says, ‘Dick Cheney is one of the finest gentlemen I’ve ever met,’ ” or all of the above.

Fresh! If "approaches to sportswriting" were vaginas, Mike Celizic would be a five-gallon jug of Summer's Eve.




By comparison, the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 after 86 years of torment was child’s play. The Tampa Rays getting to the World Series? A big ho-hum.

Disagree vehemently. The Cardinals coming out of the worst division in the parity-conscious NFL and completing a timely sprint through an uninspiring NFC playoff field (thanks, Jake Delhomme) was not more unlikely than the Tampa Bay Rays coming out of the fucking AL East in a sport in which teams outspend them ten-fold. And of course it was more surprising than the Red Sox winning the World Series, because THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FUCKING CURSE. A team with a $150 million payroll winning the world series should shock nobody.




Forget taking your hats off to these guys. Take off everything and run naked down Broadway and you'd be close to the proper celebration for this one.

Uhhh, no? Because I live in New York in this analogy and I'm a fucking Giants fan and I'm pissed about last week? And it's the damn Cardinals? And I don't want to take my pants off to celebrate a team accomplishing a feat that a Rex Grossman-led Bears squad did two years ago?



History's best 9-7 team could stretch credulity even further than it already has.....

The 1979 LA Rams were probably better than them and had one of the best defenses ever (I believe). And I'm sure there were others. My point is that I'd bet my vas deferens against a week-old beer pong cup full of PBR that Mike Celizic did not research this point.



...but I think the Cardinals and their fans want to be the underdogs. They’ve gotten here by riding the we-don’t-get-no-respect express, and there’s no sense derailing them now by installing them as favorites — or even suggesting they have a shot.

Oh, God. I hate this. Chaps my balls, as I've mentioned before. The "Disrespect Card". Just like Cornhole...all of the sudden, everybody wants to play it. There are two teams in each game, one of them will (usually) be favored. By like, 3 points. Get the fuck over it. How did they get here over the Eagles, who also played the we don't get respect card? How did the Ravens not ride that train into the Super Bowl? I know why. Because it doesn't fucking matter.

But hey, no sense saying that they might win this game! Because if we do, they might lose!





Who knows? It could work for one more game. Nothing they do should amaze us anymore.

They fucking came out of a weak conference to get to the Super Bowl. They didn't cure some rare form of cancer or save babies from dysentary-infected water supplies or something like that. If a football team in the Super Bowl wins said Super Bowl, we should not be "amazed". We should be like, "oh, one of the teams in the fucking championship football game won it".




In the process of moving, he found the Superman cape he’d lost years earlier in St. Louis, put it on and led the Cards to the NFC West title. His partner in awesome offense is Larry Fitzgerald, who has established himself as the NFL's new state-of-the-art receiver.

Yes. He found his Superman cape. And two of the best wide receivers in the entire world playing on the same team, which plays it's home games in a dome and it's away games against the Rams. Who are also in a dome. An interior decorator with Lou Gehrig's Disease could throw for 300 yards in that situation.

Also..."partner in awesome offense"? Anyone who says something like that should have a partner in Massachusetts.




Kudos, too, to running back Edgerrin James, another recycled former star who moldered on the Arizona bench until he was thrown into the breach in the playoffs.

Yes. Using Merriam's dictionary (the one you used earlier to hunt for words to describe Arizona's season), Edgerring James disintegrated on the Arizona bench until he was thrown into a break in customary friendly situations in the playoffs. Hell of a job finding random words in the dictionary to describe the season thusfar, Celizic.




Warner has more incarnations than CSI. Warner is the guy who bagged groceries to pay the bills, who played in the Arena League and in Europe trying to prove he deserved a shot at the NFL.

CSI has had three. Las Vegas, New York and Miami. If everytime someone gets a new job they call it an "incarnation", then just about everybody on the planet has had more incarnations than CSI.




At the time, nobody said he didn’t deserve to be benched.

Yes they did. I remember saying it myself. He got sacked a bunch of times and had some costly fumbles. In his first game. It was kneejerk as fuck. I remember this.




There was a sign hanging during the game that advised the Cards to “Shock the World.” That’s a tired line that has never been used without shameful hyperbole. Nothing that happens in American professional sports is ever going to shock the world, and I’m confident that the vast majority of the planet’s 6.6 billion inhabitants went to bed Sunday night blissfully unaware that a professional football team in Arizona had done something that rattled the NFL to its foundations.

You hypocritical douchebag. This whole article you've been going on telling people to go do hyperbolous things like take their clothes off and run down broadway to appropriately celebrate the shockingness of this team, and that Edgerrin James decayed on the bench like a fucking Uranium isotope, and that there aren't enough words in the entire Goddamn language to describe what they have done, and now you are pretending to be the guy that reminds everybody that their are bigger things in the world other than football? Go fuck yourself with Hines Ward's missing knee ligament, you kid fellater.




Just don’t call them favorites to win the Super Bowl. They’ve done just fine as everybody’s underdog. They’ve hit on a formula, and I, for one, am not going to mess with it.

Very honorable of you, Celizic. I mean, you do have the influence to singlehandedly derail their entire season by writing that you expect them to win this game, but somehow you are resisting that urge.

Also, they beat Atlanta at home, got 5 or so gifts from Jake Delhomme in Carolina and then beat a shaky 9-6-1 Eagles team at home again to make it. That's why they are not favored. It has nothing to do with their respect cards.