Expanded Horizons Offer Stunning View

Now I understand why Los Angeles football fans want an expansion team, and not somebody else’s hand-me-down. Expansion teams are better. They can beat the Denver Broncos. They can beat the Dallas Cowboys. Give them a year or two, they might even go to a Super Bowl, which is more than a Seahawk or Cardinal or Oiler or Lion team ever did.

Fresh from the crib, a hockey team (Florida) can make the Stanley Cup championship series. Younger than kindergartners, a basketball team (Orlando) can reach the NBA finals. And now, check out the Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars, one small step for mankind from meeting in Super Bowl XXXI, in a New Orleans dome that has been waiting eons for the hometown Saints to do something more than pay rent.

The punk Panthers are in the NFC title game. They have outlasted the Rams, Bears, Eagles, Giants, all those ratty old franchises.

The juvenile Jaguars are in the AFC title game. They are going where the Dolphins, Chiefs and Colts won’t, maybe even to a Super Bowl, where no Raider has gone for 13 years.

The phrase expansion team is a fooler, because it doesn’t mean what it once meant, when sports had fewer teams and their talent pools were so much more shallow.

The phrase even offends opponents, many of whom have pleaded with people to stop calling Carolina and Jacksonville by that name, as though their players were a bunch of has-beens and never-weres.

“That’s no ‘expansion team,’ man,” Philadelphia running back Ricky Watters said after seeing Carolina up close and personal. “Expansion teams are supposed to be a joke.”

The two-year-old Panthers have a lifetime record of 19-11. The joke’s on everybody else.

They defeated the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC playoffs Sunday, 26-17, as naturally as though they had been doing it all their lives. Emmitt Smith, Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin . . . uh, like, so? Obviously, nobody told the Panthers they were supposed to spend 10 or 20 years letting the Cowboys beat the absolute living kitty-litter out of them.

Their fans haven’t even suffered. No growing pains. No brown paper bags over their heads.

Thing is, we have short memories.

When we think of “expansion teams,” we think of the 1962 New York Mets, legendary lemons, often called the worst baseball team of all time.

We forget that seven years later, the same Mets were the World Series champions. Seven years is all it took. Do you know how long Chicago’s baseball teams, the Cubs and White Sox, have gone without either winning a World Series? Eighty years. Eight-oh. Chicago doesn’t have expansion teams. Chicago has execrable teams.

Put me down $5 in Vegas, on the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in the World Series, 1998, or 1999, latest.

Here’s something else we forget:

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

I know, I know . . . they’re forgettable. But do you happen to know who played in the Jan. 6, 1979 NFC championship game? In fact, do you know which was the host team for that game? Yes, it was our old friends, those orange blossoms themselves, the Buccaneers, who would have gone to Super Bowl XIV to meet the Pittsburgh Steelers had they not lost to the Rams, 9-0.

Remember now, this came three measly years after Tampa Bay had established itself as the sorriest NFL team we’ve ever seen, the 0-14 jokers of 1976.

So don’t look at Carolina or Jacksonville and say: “This is unbelievable.”

People are always using that word, unbelievable. Believe something for a change.

Tampa Bay went from 0-14 to the NFC title game in three seasons.

I know, I know. . . . Tampa has never been to a Super Bowl. I have news for you. Carolina and Jacksonville haven’t gotten to one yet, either.

But guess what? They just knocked off Denver and Dallas.

Believable, man!