Congratulations to the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks. You labored long and hard, suffered and overcame setbacks, and found within yourselves the strength of spirit and will to earn a chance at football immortality.

For your reward, you are being sent on an all expenses paid trip to...

...Detroit!

[After an extended and uncomfortable silence, we hear a sheepish "Hooray!" from Jerome Bettis. Larry Foote is strangely silent.]

I am about to rag on Detroit. Again. I have done so in the past and have found that it can really piss people off. There will likely be some level of negative emotional reaction to what I am about to say. (It has to be emotional because there is no intellectual defense for Detroit.)

In The Kentucky Fried Movie, when a defiant prisoner tells the evil genius Dr. Hahn to go to hell, the good Doctor's ire is raised. He fires a deadly glare at the prisoner and barks to his goon squad: "Take him to Detroit!" The prisoner pleads for mercy.

There's a reason he didn't say, "Take him to Las Vegas!" or "Take him to Orlando!" or even "Take him to Tulsa!" An English journalist visiting Detroit for the North American Auto show a few years ago put it like this:

This is the biggest annual motoring festival in the United States but is held in the bleak and frozen inner-city wasteland that is Detroit. They advise you not to go out alone after dark in the centre, not that you can walk far in Motor City, where the pavement is a mere add-on to the wide roads and the cold freezes your breath on your lips.

I responded to this in detail about three years ago when it first came out. I'll spare you the details, because I get no pleasure out of hammering on Detroit anymore. It's too easy of a target. Like making fat jokes about Michael Moore. But when the PR machine goes into overdrive and the declarations of city renaissance go over the top, somebody's got to point out that the emperor has no clothes — or least that Kwame Kilpatrick's wearing a see-through zoot suit.

Detroit is no longer the Motor City. Hasn't been for years. The biggest taxpayers in Detroit are the casinos. Casinos, which were finally permitted in the city out of desperation for cash after years of false starts and hand-wringing, are what is keeping Detroit afloat financially. Ford Field and its baseball counterpart next door are not. Nor is the domestic auto industry; GM is one of the few entities worse off that the city itself, presumably because they cannot easily install slot machines in the dashboard or your Lumina.