ArenaBowl XXI: Not just a Championship game
Tim Ball
Friday July 27, 2007
San Jose, once again the AFL’s team of excellence is pitted against a determined adversary trying to prove that they are better than best.
Alright already, can we throw away the importance of a regular season win-loss record?
Of course not . . . you say?
Last year it was the 7-9 Chicago Rush cruising through the playoffs and crashing down doors.
This year it’s an even rougher version of the down-and-outers making it to the championship game.
But does that make Columbus the classic underdog?
Does it make the SaberCats even bigger?
The Destroyers were hardly rattled as they strode into Florida by way of New York, road rough shod into Texas and walked straight through Georgia on their way to the ArenaBowl.
And the SaberCats?
San Jose had a party running up and down the field with the Crush and faced the reigning champion Rush wounded and off balance and simply, professionally, did what needed to be done.
The SaberCats didn’t get the press coverage of several other teams all year but got the trip to the ArenaBowl anyway.
Just another ho-hum season of proving why excellence and consistency (and lucky bounces) are still important if you want to reach the championship game.
Drama is good
In great westerns the evil man stands out in a crowd. The hero wears white and the villain is always a dark character in deed and attire.
But in this seasons Championship game - emblazoned with Roman numerals- is there a helpless lamb targeted by a sinister wolf?
Not hardly.
The SaberCats play their game no matter who’s in the building. Fear of any team simply does not exist as a motivational tool for a team that has had the most potent offense in the AFL year after year.
Coaches live for the underdog speech but the Destroyers beat the Storm, the Desperados and the Force without as much as a scratch to worry about. And at 13-3 the SaberCats have a worse record than two of the behemoths (Dallas 15-1, Georgia 14-2) that Columbus beat in the playoffs.
So neither team is shaking in their boots looking at each other.
NOTE: So who’s taking on who in this year’s ArenaBowl; two groups of bullies or two talented teams that deserve their shot this year?
For that answer the article has been written (ignoring the last paragraph) by the “Voice of the AFL” Ray Bentley.
Leadership
San Jose’s Mark Grieb has to be one of the calmest, classiest and best quarterbacks in football history. No one can find a moment of taunting bravado streaming from the lips of Mr. Efficiency.
Columbus quarterback Matt Nagy only spent one season away from the ArenaBowl as he led the Force there in 2005.
The men who guided these two teams into this year’s championship are hardly what you would call bad guys.
SaberCats Head coach Darren Arbet talks to his SaberCats players the way he was talked to by his mentor.
Who it just so happens, is Doug Kay the Head coach of the Destroyers.
NOTE: The Mercury News has a good article about these great men:
We have been led to this game for all the right reasons. The Destroyers overcame the odds with all of the drama it would take and the SaberCats showed us what a football “team” is in a sport that truly defines the word.
So dispel any rumors and discard any nonsense about underdogs and bullies. The SaberCats are the SaberCats and are where they could have been for the last six-seasons and the Destroyers are undefeated in post season play.
Let’s all sit back and watch this game unfold before us as a lesson about life and about two entirely different teams arriving at the same place at the same time.
The SaberCats have proven how important staying on task is and the Destroyers have shown to us all (yet again, thank you Chicago) that a losing record doesn’t exist when you make the playoffs.
Destiny
The Arena Football League is a success story.
Here it is 21-years in the making with all of the storylines of a movie script with a cast of characters that would make Martin Luther King Jr. proud of his stance on what defines goodness.
“ArenaBowl XXI”and still with a brighter future ahead, the AFL and its cast of athletes and characters are worth every minute of our time.
Mark Grieb is the story of the quiet man-hero that makes being a man not such a bad thing and shows where the Arena League proves its worth to the sports world.
In a league where the players are here for all of the right reasons, that single issue may get lost to a populace that has come to expect individual athletes to be as much a problem to society as a help to a team.
Grieb’s stats record reads like how-to book on perfection. His demeanor towards fans and the game of football is the example to follow for every player yet to come to the AFL.
In a society where masculine means either being a braggart, a felon, or an indefinable freak show, men like Grieb point society in the right direction.
Men like Kay, Arbet and Nagy, San Jose’s Terry Malley, James Roe, Clevan Thomas, Dan Loney, Matt Kinsinger, Omarr Smith, Phil Glover, and George Williams and Columbus’ Damien Groce, Brad Pyatt, Marcus Knight and David Saunders represent in the Championship game, a tiny segment of a league of such greatness that that story is yet to be written.
And it will be.
ArenaBowl XXI represents more than just a Championship game to be won by one of two teams; it is another step in the right direction for the entire sport of football.
