2. Some talented players have to make a leap of faith. You hope either they don't know what they're signing up for or they're determined to not repeat history. With this group, you would think the Cardinals have existed for just a single season, when, in fact, they've been around for 110 years, longer than any other NFL team.
It doesn't hurt if, as wide receiver Anquan Boldin said, you had never really heard of the Bidwills and if you were generally oblivious to the years of futility suffered in the desert. But I wouldn't count on that.
I asked quarterback Kurt Warner - the kind of guy you would trust to take your mom out for milkshakes, by the way - if he was concerned about all the Bidwill talk that preceded his arrival in Arizona.
"I think there's always reservations coming into different places where you're not sure or ... where the perspective from the outside is more about a losing organization," he said.
But everyone seems to have accepted from the moment they arrived that this team was destined for the Super Bowl. Which seems like a silly thought. From Tempe to Scottsdale, this might still sound like blasphemy, but Warner actually praised the Bidwills.
"My relationship with the ownership has been great since I got here," he said. "The one thing I commend them on, since the first time I got here, they've been asking me, trying to make adjustments where they need to make adjustments to get to the point we're at today."
It certainly took them long enough. Charles Bidwill bought the team for $50,000 in 1932. Though the team passed from father to son and kept hopping cities westward, it wasn't until recently that the Bidwill family committed that much money to annual salaries.
The stories surrounding the team's propensity to pinch pennies are somewhat infamous: locking the Gatorade cooler, making players fork over the Federal Express fee to deliver paychecks.
So it's not surprising that when Ken Whisenhunt interviewed for the head coaching job two years ago, he questioned the ownership's commitment to winning. Its response - it promised him a new weight room, it told him it would pay for a good staff, it promised to keep talented players on the roster and whatever he needed to help the team escape its pathetic past.
So here the Cardinals are, on the doorstep of America's biggest game. In just a few short weeks, the Bidwills, a mainstay at the top of the charts, completely erased their name from one of sport's most notorious lists.
It only took 60 years.
Here's hoping it doesn't take the Angelos clan quite that long.
Steelers (14-4) vs. Cardinals (12-7)
Sunday, 6:30 p.m.
TV: Chs. 11, 4
Radio: 1090 AM
Line: Steelers by 7
