Extended Coverage

The 2007 ArenaBowl Champion San Jose SaberCats were honored by Mayor Chuck Reed at the City Council meeting on Tuesday afternoon at San Jose City Hall.

For his first-ever Arena Football League game, this fan discovered more speed on the field and more fun in the stands than at an NFL game -- plus an abundance of entertaining collisions with immovable objects.

The Arena Football League made a bold statement by bringing ArenaBowl XXI to New Orleans this week. Fans came from far and wide to support the AFL and a great city on the rebound from a horrific tragedy.

The Columbus Destroyers presented by Germain committed two costly turnovers and were unable to recover in a 55-33 loss to the San Jose SaberCats in ArenaBowl XXI New Orleans on Sunday. A record neutral site crowd of 15,147 was on hand at New Orleans Arena

"It's fantastic," said Jay Cicero of the New Orleans Sports Foundation. "It's a great piece of business for New Orleans at a very slow time for our hospitality business."

"You watch (Nagy) in the games and his demeanor over the course of a game, and he just seems to have a real control and real confidence about him," Grieb said.

But before the SaberCats get too confident, there's another Cinderella story to remember. Just last season, Chicago (also 7-9) upset San Jose to win the American Conference title and Orlando to win the ArenaBowl.

If the San Jose SaberCats defeat the Columbus Destroyers in Arena Bowl XXI today at the New Orleans Arena, it will be their third league title in six years, a feat matched only by Detroit and Tampa Bay more than a decade ago.

It wasn’t Mark Grieb’s greatest outing of his career, but it was more than enough for the San Jose SaberCats to defeat the Columbus Destroyers to win ArenaBowl XXI by the count of 55-33 in front of a sellout crowd in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Argus, CA - 1 hour agoBut, as the Destroyers have shown in recent weeks and Chicago showed last season, statistics and records mean nothing in arena football. ...

The SaberCats had the better record and statistics going into ArenaBowl XXI. But they couldn't fully appreciate their work until Sunday. Now, they can rejoice.

The San Jose SaberCats realize the regular season won't mean anything when they face the Columbus Destroyers in the ArenaBowl today in New Orleans.

Though Shelley's Destroyers are a considerable underdog - as recently as Friday, San Jose was listed as a 6.5 point favorite Columbus has made a habit this postseason of tripping up the AFL's best.

The SaberCats beat the Columbus Destroyers 55-33 in Sunday's ArenaBowl to earn their third Arena League title in six years. It was the first team championship decided in the city since Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005.

ArenaBowl notables: It's the first sellout of a neutral site for the Arena Football League's championship game. . . . The game is expected to bring in $15 million to New Orleans through tourists' spending.

As tempting as it would be to write that the Columbus Destroyers’ Cinderella season disappeared in a flash, a quick, painless burst of bad fortune, that just isn’t the way things went down in front of a capacity crowd of 17, 056 in the New Orleans Arena t

To some, it seems like an eternity since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the metro area Aug. 29, 2005. In the days after the storm, arena football seemed insignificant. . It was tough enough for the Saints to continue to function.

As the Columbus Destroyers dissected their errors in the ArenaBowl — and there were many — they would invariably stop themselves and heap credit on the San Jose SaberCats.

While it wasn’t the huge zoo Super Bowl Media Day has become, and I didn’t hear any ridiculous if-you-were-a-tree-what-tree-would-you-be questions, Friday’s media session for the Columbus Destroyers had more than its share of intrigue for me.

Media Day for the San Jose SaberCats was business as usual for the two-time ArenaBowl champs on Friday afternoon. Unlike the Destroyers, who were completely loose and walking around with the “nothing to lose” mentality, the SaberCats seemed very business