This year’s Super Bowl matchup is why I have come to love the NFL—and it’s why pro football has become the king of sports, while the NBA and major league baseball are merely rank pretenders.

The media that descend upon Houston this week like locusts on a Nebraska wheat field will report on every story you can conceive of, plus a few hundred you probably can’t. There’ll be stories on the genius of Patriots coach Bill Belichik, whose defense last week made the unstoppable Peyton Manning look jumpier than a meth freak. They’ll file warm, happy stories about the improbable rise of Carolina QB Jake Delhomme, who by all rights should wake up each morning wondering if all of this has been a mere dream. They’ll write about how the Titans’ loss to New England saved Houstonians from their worst civic nightmare: the prospect of having to give Bud Adams a big, fat trophy.

There are apt to be stories on everything from how defensive linemen deal with painful plantar warts to the favorite beers of New England’s aptly named Tedy Bruschi. This is the place where a reporter once asked a Super Bowler, “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” And this is the kind of stuff you can expect when too many Media Geniuses have to start thinking at roughly the same time.

And yet at this celebration of football’s biggest game, I’m willing to bet my AP Stylebook that no one will write about what makes this game especially worth celebrating: the NFL’s harmonious blending of state socialism and entrepreneurial enterprise.

This year’s Super Bowl participants are the perfect poster children for the league’s happy hybrid.

The Carolina Panthers owe their presence to the state socialism part. Two years ago, they picked up but one lonesome victory amid 15 Sundays of misery. Back then, it seemed more likely that Dennis Rodman could be elected president of the United States than that the Panthers would reach the Super Bowl anytime soon.

Yet here they are—and only in the NFL. After all, only in the NFL are the schedules fixed each year so that the teams with the worst records get the lightest burdens while the big dogs get to devour each other. Meanwhile, the league’s salary cap not only prevents a handful of teams from stockpiling the lion’s share of talent—as six or seven franchises do in baseball—it all but ensures that the strongest teams must shed several quality players each season.

The availability of free agent “cap casualties” is the last great leveler in a league that already boasts more talent parity than any other in pro sports. The old adage is true about any given Sunday: In the NFL, the margin between making the playoffs and spending all January on the sofa for many teams comes down to the difference between success and failure on an average of one play per game.

In baseball, rebuilding efforts take years—and even then may fail. In the NBA, some franchises, like the L.A. Clippers and Denver Nuggets and Washington Bullet/Wizards, remain moss-covered for an entire generation. Under the NFL’s share-the-wealth system, you almost have to be serially incompetent, like the Detroit Lions, to fail to bubble up near the top at least once in a while. Thus, the Panthers, despite a history of something less than mediocrity, have actually played in two NFC championships and now earned a shot at the biggest prize of all.

Yet the beauty of the NFL’s system is that, while giving almost everyone a turn in the spotlight, it demands much more than mere competence to stay near the top. Cue the Patriots, representing the league’s entrepreneurial side, who are playing in their second Super Bowl in three seasons.

In spite of its socialist leanings, the NFL leaves room for an expert elite to accumulate a disproportionate share of the wealth. Evaluate talent astutely, draft wisely, manage the salary cap adeptly, know dispassionately when it’s time to jettison a beloved but overpriced star, fortuitously avoid injuries, and you can be a perennial player in a league full of player-haters.

Including this Sunday’s game, seven different teams have played in the five Super Bowls since 1999. If the Panthers prevail, all five winners will have been first-time champions.

During that span, however, the Raiders and Eagles have reached three league championship games; the Titans, Patriots and Buccaneers have played in two.

In this league, to borrow Hunter Thompson’s phrase, the scum also rises. But so does the cream. This weekend, once again, they make a very tasty combination.

Orange sleuthing

Phil Fulmer has been on a hotseat lately, and it takes a pretty big fire to warm up anyplace that Phil is going to sit. He coaches a disappointing team that (twice!) loses ignominiously in the Booby Prize, er, Peach Bowl, and he gets a raise. The Vols’ offense, the carpers maintain, is train-wreck ugly; it’s like listening to someone drag their fingernails across a 100-yard blackboard.

I can at least understand that railbirding (though I happen to think Phil did one of his better jobs of coaching this season).

What I don’t get is the hammering of Phil the detective. In case you haven’t been reading along, or you’re not a Crimson Tide fan, it turns out that a major reason that Alabama is in the NCAA pokey is that Phil—who was already more hated by ’Bama boosters than any non-Auburn person alive—turned them into college football’s cops. Not only that: Phil did the sleuthing himself.

For some reason, a lot of folks—besides the tattle-ees in Tuscaloosa—have been whacking Fulmer with verbal two-by-fours every since the story came out (thanks to the incompetence, by the way, of NCAA investigators, who accidentally divulged that Phil was their “confidential” source). “Doesn’t he have better things to do?” they complained. “Shouldn’t he be paying more attention to recruiting, and returning the Vols to your better quality bowl games?”

Well, I don’t know. I understand how coaches get tired of losing recruits to other programs that they’re convinced are cheating. But that’s not to say Fulmer’s motives are only self-serving. When you turn in a cheater in college football, you can be certain they’ll comb the carpet in search of your own dirt. Fulmer knows it. That he turned in the Tide anyhow tells me his program is more on the up-and-up than a lot of Vol haters claim.

Let’s be honest: For at least the past 10 years, the football programs at Alabama and Auburn have been cesspools of corruption. Bill Clinton on TV, claiming he never had sex with “that woman,” still had more integrity than these two sleazy operations. Everyone in the higher ranks of college football will tell you privately what none will say publicly: Alabama and Auburn both have deserved the NCAA’s death penalty.

Which makes you stop and consider one other possible motive for Phil’s detective work: Maybe the guy would simply like to see someone do the right thing.

How It Looks from the La-Z-Boy

Panthers 19, Patriots 17

Last time I checked, the Pats officially were seven-point favorites. They deserve to be. They’re that good—even without giving Bill Belichik an extra week to scheme defenses.

But something tells me not to pick against the Panthers. Go to St. Louis and shut down the Rams, then go to Philadelphia and gut-stomp the Eagles, and you can beat anybody. Defenses win big games, and the Panthers can bring the biggest D.