We Are About to Witness a Football Monstrosity

GREEN BAY, Wis. — This is like ripping Sneezy, dumping on Elmo, trashing each of the 101 Dalmatians.

But somebody has to say it.

The Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars have ruined the NFL playoffs.

The Panthers and Jaguars have turned today's storied conference championship games into freak shows.

The Panthers and Jaguars are not old enough, frustrated enough, or charming enough.

They are not wanted. They do not belong.

Apologies in advance to their long-suffering fans.

Heck, some of those poor people have not missed a game in franchise history!

The Panthers in Green Bay is like a heathen buying his way into church.

The Jaguars in a championship game against Bill Parcells is like a kid deacon calling out the pope.

Admit it. The proper opponent at Lambeau Field today would have been the Dallas Cowboys.

They would have slipped and slid into eventual ignominy, but at least they would have made sense. The Cowboys would have filled the field with the sort of emotions on which football was built--anger, fear, humiliation, revenge.

The Panthers will fill the field with . . . curiosity?

Admit it. The proper opponent for the Patriots today would have been the Denver Broncos.

John Elway deserved another shot at the Super Bowl. The city of Denver deserved another chance at big-game redemption. Parcells deserved a chance to pull another postseason upset.

The Jaguars deserve . . . what, an opportunity to show it's a better football town than Gainesville?

It would be different if these were, as cliche factories like to say, "Cinderella" teams.

The Panthers and Jaguars are not Cinderellas.

They are Frankensteins.

They were built with a combination of parts never before available to NFL teams, a mixture of pieces that were powerful even before being combined.

So the franchises cost the owners $140 million and 60% less TV revenues for three years. So big deal.

In return for those hits, they received the most lucrative NFL commodity of all--players.

As many good players as they could squeeze underneath a $37.1-million salary cap, the same figure that governed the rest of the league, only the new teams were essentially starting from zero.

And as many good players as they could fit in two seasons of double draft picks, which included extra picks in the first and second rounds in 1995.