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Among the final four in NFL playoffs, Eagles have the top market and best story line

PHILADELPHIA — Football is not baseball. There is a clock and there are cheerleaders, and momentum is a real concept, not just a word. As Earl Weaver used to say of baseball, “Momentum is tomorrow’s starting pitcher.”

One football player, even a great quarterback, can’t dominate a game all by himself. It takes a village working together to clear the land, and that is just what the Eagles have going for them at the moment. Of course, it is what the Arizona Cardinals appear to have as well. Which is the more potent force, the more unified village, will be decided Sunday in the NFC championship game.

You will be watching, of course, and you will not be alone.

That is another major difference between the sports. People across the country are going to sit down in front of their television sets, some enjoying the final days of analog broadcast, to take in the conference championships. Perhaps the numbers will be a little softer than in past years, but they will still be big numbers. And two weeks later, the Super Bowl will attract an audience regardless of the participants.

If this were baseball, and a similar set of teams had survived to the league championship series, there would be much moaning about a lack of marquee quality to the matchups. If baseball turned out a corresponding final four—and, come to think of it, baseball nearly did in 2008—network executives would be bungee-jumping from their New York towers without the benefit of the bungee.

As excited as Philadelphia was for the Phillies, and as semi-interested as our friends in the Tampa Bay area were for the Rays, the rest of the country never caught on, even though two fairly major markets, Boston and Los Angeles, provided the opposition in the league championship series.

If you could guarantee television executives that the baseball league finals would be Cubs-Mets and Yankees-Red Sox every season, they would show up at Bud Selig’s office with trainloads of money. Bud would be asleep at his desk and not hear them knocking, but someone would eventually let them in.

Perhaps you missed it, what with the parade and all, but America hated the World Series between the Phillies and Rays. Maybe it wasn’t truly “hated,” but it certainly wasn’t watched. America was more interested in “Dancing With The Lost Idols” or something that offered more of a story line than: Joe Blanton, fact or fiction?

Part of the reason for the difference between the sports, understandably, is that watching a football playoff matchup requires just a three-hour window, not a weeklong commitment. If football is a round on “Jeopardy!, then baseball in the postseason is like a Ken Burns mini-series. (”In this tense scene, the pitcher will step off the rubber and the batter will ask for time and exit the batter’s box.”)

If the TV types had their druthers, the current football postseason would probably have included some combination of the New York Giants, the Dallas Cowboys, the Green Bay Packers, the Chicago Bears, the Indianapolis Colts, the New England Patriots and the New York Jets. In that group, you have ratings winners. You have the defending champions (Giants), the dark lords of the league (Patriots), the traditional sizzle (Cowboys), the cute and cuddly (Packers), the big markets (Bears, Jets), and the team whose quarterback is so good in those commercials (Colts).

Instead, they’ve got Eagles-Cardinals and Steelers-Ravens. Not sexy, perhaps, but there is the promise of pretty good football, and that is why football fans across the country will pull up a chair and watch. They will watch even though, among these four teams, the surprising Eagles might have the best story line and might provide the best draw. It is the only team among the four that operates in a top 10 media market, and the only one that had its five-time Pro Bowl quarterback benched the week before Thanksgiving.

Pittsburgh and Baltimore bring the spectacle of a great defensive battle, and there is a good chance of snow on Sunday in Pittsburgh. Television loves snow. Out in Arizona, where there is relatively little chance of snow, the Eagles and Cardinals will meet in the championship game for the only time since 1948, when the Cards were based in Chicago and when the Eagles won their first NFL title, in Shibe Park.

This is not baseball, with its exquisite tedium and the slow building of tension. On Sunday, tension will be in the building by kickoff. So will the television audience.

Because baseball is not football. Baseball doesn’t have the same immediacy, the same universal appeal regardless of the teams involved. It also doesn’t have that little item called the point spread. That doesn’t hurt interest in football, either.

Bob Ford is a sports columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.