Here is an article that pissed me off

COMMENTARY
By Mike Celizic
NBCSports.com contributor
Updated: 9:46 p.m. ET Jan. 01, 2004

No playoff year is complete without a Cinderella team, and this year’s NFL tournament has that in the Carolina Panthers, the team that’s not supposed to be here. But this Cinderella needs a better scriptwriter.

For starters, people are supposed to want Cinderella to win; they’re not supposed to be rooting for the glass slipper to slide perfectly onto the stepsister’s foot. The stepsister isn’t supposed to be prettier than Cinderella. And she isn’t supposed to have a better personality.

Poor Carolina. It really is the team that came from 1-15 two years ago to quietly put together an 11-5 season, won the NFC South, and did it with a coach and a quarterback who have the national name recognition of a couple of motor vehicle clerks.

Quick, tell us one thing that John Fox is noted for. (Hint: Fox is the Panthers coach.) If you can answer that, try the bonus question: find Louisiana-Lafayette, alma mater of quarterback Jake “Who’s He?” Delhomme, on a map.

These guys are a great story, and in most years we’d be on it like fat on a sumo wrestler. By now, with the playoffs starting, the whole country would be hoping that the Panthers can do to the NFL what the Marlins did to baseball just a few months ago.

But we’re not. The reason is that the Panthers happened to climb out of their grave at the same time that the Dallas Cowboys were riding into the playoffs with Bill Parcells leading the way. As good a story as the Panthers are, Tuna leads the menu this post-season.

You could say that the Cowboys are a Cinderella story of their own, and they would be except for the fact that Parcells is the coach. When a guy like Fox, a career assistant who had eight jobs in his first eight years of coaching and went 12 more years before getting a shot at a head job, makes the playoffs, it’s a surprise.

When Parcells makes it, even with a team that wasn’t supposed to be much better than 6-10 or 7-9, it’s not a surprise; it’s yet another coronation.

What makes all this especially bad for Carolina is that they face Parcells and the Cowboys in the playoffs’ first round. Put the Panthers up against the Rams or the Eagles or anyone else in the first round, and they’re Cinderella. Put them against the Tunas, and they’re just cinders.

Parcells is the story of the year. The Panthers are just a team that’s gotten in their way.

It’s too bad, because the Carolina story is one of the great ones, very much like that of the Marlins. Both teams were on hard times. Both teams had fan bases that were eroding faster than sand castles in a hurricane. Both had rosters few people had heard of. Both made the playoffs with no one expecting them to get out of the first round.

You don’t get stories like this in the NBA, where underdog teams get their backsides whipped early in the playoffs and you can pretty much predict who’s going into the finals six months before the season even begins. In the NHL, you sometimes get an underdog – most recently it was the Wild – making a deep run into the playoffs, but they virtually never win it all.

In baseball you get it occasionally. In the NFL, it seems like there’s a Cinderella every year. The league’s rigid salary cap has a lot to do with that; it allows for quick turnarounds in the fortunes of franchises. The importance of coaching has more to do with it. A great coach can take a bunch of losers and turn them into winners virtually overnight – and vice versa.

Parcells is everyone’s favorite great coach, which is why so little attention and support is being thrown the Panthers’ way. But Fox is a pretty good story, too. In fact, in the way he attacks a game, with ball-control and defense, he’s very much a Mini Tuna.

His problem now is that no one really knows who he is, while everyone knows Parcells. Fox wasn’t even the first choice for the Panthers’ head job two years ago. The Panthers originally wanted Steve Spurrier to take over what had become a sorry excuse for a team. But the team decided it didn’t want to ante up Spurrier’s asking price and went with the little-known Fox, then the defensive coordinator for the Giants.

That alone is a good story, considering what happened to Spurrier and the team that won the bidding war for him, the Washington Redskins. Fox is the plugger who made good, the little guy with no name who beat the famous glamour guy, the guy who’s taken a team to a division title and the playoffs with only one Pro Bowler on the entire squad.

Delhomme is another good story, the quarterback from Louisiana-Lafayette who was on track to be a career clipboard-holder. He took over from the ancient Rodney Peete early in the season and did just enough all year to win games.

Sadly for them, we’re not going to hear much about their stories. Not this week, at any rate. This week, it’s all about Tuna, not Mini Tuna. This week, Cinderella is supposed to lose.

But it’s not all bad, because if the Panthers beat the Cowboys, we’ll suddenly decide that they were the best story around all along. If they beat the Cowboys, Cinderella will be back in familiar surroundings, with everybody rooting for her to be the belle of the ball.

© 2003 NBC Sports.com

 

I like that story...

It has a happy ending

 

I didnt post the title of the article. Panthers, We Want You To Lose.

 

Hell making the people who buy ink by the barrel look bad would be really cool, maybe even wake folks up a little.

 

Actually, I thought it was a good article. The writer was basically saying that the Panthers should be getting the attention that a 'worst to first' story deserves, but they arn't because Parcells is, well, Parcells. This Panther team is a great story, but too much attention is being thrown Parcells way because he is well known. I think what he was saying is that we are the real story, not some rerun old storyline like Parcells...but until we knock Dallas out, no one will realize it.

 

Kinda reminds me of 2 years ago, when we had an NFL record-setting worst season, and still didn't get the #1 overall draft pick because of Houston.

 

Doesn't piss ME off, especially after we kicked their tuna asses. What DOES piss me off is the comment "Parcells is everyone’s favorite great coach, which is why so little attention and support is being thrown the Panthers’ way."

Who is "everyone"? That overhyped idiot sure isn't MY favorite "great?" coach, and I don't know anybody who can tolerate the whackjob.

 

so who is your favorite coach?