Cardinals will never get respect because ... Arizona

There is a fairly simple explanation why the Arizona Cardinals may not be getting the respect they deserve from the sporting world.

It is a problem that, sadly, has nothing to do with the Cardinals themselves and everything to do with … Arizona.

The Arizona Republic’s Jeremy Cluff noted in an article this week that even though the Cardinals have the NFL’s best record at 10-2, including seven road wins, a number of power polls still don’t list them as the league’s best team.

And many NFL analysts and TV talking heads still haven’t given the Cardinals their due.

However, what I would say to those members of the team who haven’t been here long, including Kyler Murray, DeAndre Hopkins, James Conner, Zach Ertz and others is: Do not take it personally.

It’s not you.

It’s us.

Arizona was the last of the lower 48 states to join the union. We’re the least known. The most precocious.

Our stunning desert paradise is the kid brother of America, and is treated as such.

We may be celebrating our 110th birthday in February, but Arizona remains a social, political and cultural pubescent compared to our older siblings east of the Mississippi.

Back in 2001, when the Diamondbacks played the New York Yankees in the World Series, the nice folks at The Christian Science Monitor asked if I would write something that would explain Phoenix to readers unfamiliar with our city.

I noted that while television viewers would see a picture of a mature Southwestern metropolis, that image did not match reality.

“Phoenix may look fully grown,” I wrote, “but it’s still a kid. Phoenix has just started shaving. It doesn’t yet have its driver’s license. Phoenix hasn’t decided what it wants to be when it grows up. In comic strip terms, if New York is Mr. Wilson (and it is), Phoenix is Dennis the Menace.”

More than that, Arizona was – and still is – a place made for second chances.

The D-Backs’ roster that won the series in 2001 was filled with players who’d made their bones somewhere else and were looking to prove they still had what it took.

And they did. Randy Johnson. Curt Schilling. Luis Gonzalez. Steve Finley. Tony Womack. Mark Grace. Jay Bell.

The same is true of individuals in just about every walk of life.

And Arizona is a transitory place, a state filled with migrants from other states who bring with them habits, traditions and loyalties from older, more well-established communities.

It is also the kind of place that manufactures homegrown iconoclasts, among them national powerhouses as varied as Barry Goldwater, Cesar Chavez and Sandra Day O’Connor. It also welcomes newcomers who transform themselves into Arizona icons, like John McCain.

Along with all that, of course, come the kooks and cranks and outlaws. Then again, isn’t contrast the thing makes a painting come to life, gives it drama? The light against the dark, or what Renaissance painters called “chiaroscuro.”

(I’m not exactly sure what any of that means but it sounds good, don’t you think?)

Over my years in Arizona I’ve heard from friends, relatives and colleagues in other states who find it both obstinate and odd that Arizona does not observe Daylight Saving Time.

I tell them our pioneering, nonconformist state chooses not to “fall back.” And because of that, when the rest of the country “springs forward” they find that we’re already there.