It's been two weeks since I last blogged. I wonder if anybody noticed.
It is good, very good, to see Tony Dungy taking the Indianapolis Colts to the Super Bowl. He left a lot of fans behind in the Tampa Bay area when he was fired after the 2001 season. (How can fans fire the owners? Not buying tickets is the only way I can think of.) He is a class act and he knows football. When he arrived in 1996 the Bucs had had 13 consecutive losing seaons. Less than two years later they won a playoff game. He left a Bucs team good enough to win after the 2002 season.
This will be the first time a black head coach has taken a team to the Super Bowl in the 41-year history of the Super Bowl but, technically, he won't be the first. There will be two of them this year and Coach Lovie Smith beat him to it when the Chicago Bears won earlier in the day. Smith is another class act. He and Dungy are going to upgrade the Super Bowl to a nice-guy competition, imagine that.
Dungy hired Smith for his first NFL job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1996. Long-suffering Bucs fans have kept track of former Bucs players who have done good elsewhere and now we have the spectacle of two former coaches who have become head coaches elsewhere in the NFL and they have done just fine without the Bucs' organization and fickle fan support.
I'm not even a huge football fan. But I will be watching the game on Super Bowl Sunday, and I hope Tony Dungy and the Colts go all the way.
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1 comment:
nice tidbit! now i have a team to root for sunday, too. and here i was feeling sad that the pats lost. ok, i'm still sad. but all the more reason to cheer against the bears!
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