SPORTS
FICKLE FOOTBALL
Finding home amid a sea of transplants sporting their hometown’s colors — the Steelers’ black and yellow, the Rams’ blue and gold — can be rough for an Arizona Cardinals fan, especially in these outskirts of the West Valley. Poke your head into any local sports bar on a Sunday afternoon, Thursday or Monday night and you’ll reliably spot “either Raiders fans or Cowboys fans,” says D’Metrid James, a Watson Estates resident and third-generation Arizonan. “I never saw anything that spoke specifically to [Cardinals] fans in Buckeye,” James said. And that’s what inspired the 49-year-old father of three to start the Buckeye Bird Gang fan page on Facebook and host the group’s first watch party Dec. 1 at Tailgaters. That, and being a homegrown fan. “I grew up riding horses in what’s now the city of Buckeye, when it was all agriculture,” James, a realtor by day, told InBuckeye . “As natives, I remember being a kid growing up and we didn’t have a football team.” It’s true. The Cardinals didn’t move from St. Louis to Arizona until 1987. Before that, the Grand Canyon State was an off-and-on
D’Metrid James, founder of Buckeye Bird Gang, watches the Arizona Cardinals play against the Minnesota Vikings at Tailgaters
Minor leagues, arena football and smaller professional leagues competing with the NFL have graced the Arizona airwaves since the 1980s. Some were ahead of their time. Others couldn’t compete against the Cardinals, but one coexists with them.
The Arizona Wranglers were a member of the United States Football League. This professional team played two spring seasons at Arizona State University’s Sun Devil Stadium starting in 1983. In 1985, the franchise merged with the Oklahoma Outlaws. The short-lived Arizona Outlaws played only one season in the USFL. Former ASU coach Frank Kush returned to Sun Devil Stadium in 1985 to act as the Outlaws’ head coach for their lone season. The Arizona Rattlers are arena football’s winningest team ever. The Rattlers came to Phoenix in 1992 and never looked back. To date, the team is the longest continuously active indoor football team in the country. The Arizona Hotshots were a minor league member of the Alliance of American Football that played one season in 2019 at Sun Devil Stadium before the league folded due to bankruptcy.
Sports Grill Dec. 1, 2024.
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O N A WARM DECEMBER MORNING, TAILGATERS SPORTS GRILL WAS setting up shop for another football Sunday. Fans hunkered down behind a cold pint in front of giant flat-screens, ready to cheer — or groan — in unison as they watched their teams in the final weeks of the NFL’s regular season. It was business as usual, for the most part: The Kansas City Chiefs won after a doinked Harrison Butker field goal miraculously split the uprights as time expired; Quentin Johnston lived up to his “Dropston” nickname; Aaron Rodgers inched closer to his anticlimactic retirement with an overtime loss at Miami. But this Sunday, something at Tailgaters was a little different.
BUCKEYE BIRD GANG The West Valley has an NFL team. Time to start acting like it, say these fans
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BY MONICA D. SPENCER AND ELIAS WEISS
InBuckeye.com | Winter 2025
Winter 2025 | InBuckeye.com
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