John Madden: Cardinals deserve to be in Super Bowl

With John Madden calling the Super Bowl, viewers should expect solid analysis for the year’s most-watch football game, at least nationally. In Oklahoma City, it won’t beat out the BCS national championship game, which earned a 51.7 rating on KOCO-5. NBC will air the game at 5 p.m. Sunday.

In a conference call this week, Madden, play-by-play announcer Al Michaels and studio analyst Cris Collinsworth talked about the game. Here are a few of their comments:

MADDEN ON UNPREDICTABILITY IN THE NFL: “The NFL should stand for ‘Never Figure League.’ The minute you think you know what’s going to happen, you realize you don’t know a thing. Here we are with Arizona Cardinals in the Super Bowl. That’s the great thing about the NFL. You don’t have a vote. People ask if this is a good thing for NBC? It doesn’t make a difference. The teams that play the best at this time earn the right to play in the Super Bowl, and both of these teams earned that right. They both deserve to be here.

MADDEN ON THE GAP BETWEEN SUPER BOWL WINNERS AND LOSERS: “The greatest gap in sports is between the winner and the loser of the Super Bowl. The winner has confetti, parades, rings, the whole thing. The loser puts his head down and goes to his house.”

MICHAELS ON THE CARDINALS: “I’m struck by the fact that the Arizona Cardinals have become a major story. Everybody’s talking about them, and I’m very excited about this matchup because we know about the Steelers, They have great tradition. In total contrast, nobody could have anticipated the Cardinals in the Super Bowl. There’s a tremendous air of mystery about this Super Bowl now. We know about the Kurt Warner story and Larry Fitzgerald has become a megastar almost as fast as anybody that I can recall. I can’t wait; this is going to be a lot of fun.”

MICHAELS ON WHO WILL WIN SUPER BOWL XLIII: “We can look at a hundred different things and you can say, ‘OK here’s what has to happen in a game for this team to win,’ but the beautiful thing about sports and about football is that you just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

COLLINSWORTH ON SUPER BOWL XLIII MATCHUP: “If you had said at the beginning of the playoffs that it would be a Pittsburgh-Arizona Super Bowl, a lot of people would have thought it wasn’t the best matchup for NBC or the Super Bowl, but now you look at what the Cardinals team has done, in particular offensively against tremendous defenses, there is an opportunity to see one of the best against one of the best. We all know about the Pittsburgh Steelers defense and what they’ve done.”

COLLINSWORTH ON THE STEELERS’ DEFENSE: “They have the opportunity to make Kurt Warner look really bad. If you play against Pittsburgh and Dick LeBeau’s defense, they are that good. You can throw five interceptions against them every easily.”

COLLINSWORTH ON KURT WARNER: “If you can take the MVP vote at the end of the year instead of at the end of the regular season, he may well be MVP because of what he’s done with this football team. Being around that team, you understand how significant he is to that team. This was a team with no path, direction or experience, and they constantly turned to him and what a job he’s done. Fitzgerald has made the plays on the other end, but no one would deny that without Kurt Warner, who has this knowledge and experience of the playoffs, they would not be here.”

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