All over Tempe and the Valley, people were talking about it.
The line to get in started at 10:30 the night before. People skipped work and ditched class for it. It was more excitement than the city had seen since Dennis Cahill announced his run for mayor.
The occasion? A regular-season football game featuring two teams that don't even make their homes in this state. And a wake-up call to how terrible our own "professional" football team really is.
At every ASU class and Tempe business, the Miami Dolphins and San Diego Chargers' Monday Night Football game, moved to Tempe because of the Southern California wildfires, was the dominant topic of conversation.
"Are you going to the game tonight?" "I hear the tickets are free!" "There's people lining up already outside the stadium!"
The tailgaters for the out-of-towners started congregating around Sun Devil Stadium around 10 a.m. yesterday, despite an Arizona Cardinals press release urging fans not to arrive before 4:30 p.m. Parking was a mess, inconveniencing thousands of students, but to many it seemed not to matter.
As Tempe prepared for its first Monday Night Football game since 1999, when the Cardinals were kind enough to end Steve Young's career, we at The State Press couldn't help but wonder: Isn't this what Sundays are supposed to be like around here?
Stand on the corner of University Drive and College Street around 2 p.m. any day the Cardinals are in town, and glance at the upper deck of Sun Devil Stadium. If you can count more than 15 fans, you know one of two things is true:
The Cowboys, Packers, Broncos or another respectable team is playing the Cardinals, or the game has been canceled, and the Promise Keepers evangelical group has rented the stadium.
The stadium seats 70,000, but a Cardinals game rarely draws more than half that. Correct us if we're wrong, but isn't the local NFL team supposed to outdraw the college team in the area?
Oh right, it's the Cardinals, and thanks to penny-pinching owner Bill Bidwill, the team is an unwavering disappointment.
Their shocking 16-13 upset of the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday notwithstanding, this is a team that consistently, and willingly, lets its fans down. Not everyone knows this, but Bidwill is several million dollars below the NFL's salary cap: He has money to spend, yet he refuses to spend it. The team is run like a business, and the fans are the ones who get screwed.
Let's not forget that Valley voters were magnanimous enough to reward this train wreck of an NFL franchise with a brand-new, publicly financed stadium in Glendale. Masochism, it seems, is alive and well in the Phoenix area.
The Monday Night madness was fun while it lasted, but don't expect that feeling again any time soon. To the Cardinals, as they prepare for their cross-town move, we say: Good riddance.
