Well it’s that time of year again. The time that every sports fan dreads. The end of the football season.

Oh sure there’s still the Super Bowl and if you really want to scrape, I guess the pro bowl is still out there. But it’s time to face the cold hard truth: football is over.

Not that this year hasn’t been an eventful one full of stories including the one BIG story. I’m not talking about all the many, many troubles in Dallas or about Brett Favre’s second consecutive MVP award (a feat previously accomplished only by the great one Joe Montana).

No the BIG story came from two unlikely places: Charlotte, N.C. and Jacksonville, Fla.

The big story this year was the success of the two “expansion” teams. Though I believe the time has come to shed the expansion label. Counting the playoffs Carolina finished with a 12-6 record and a division title. Jacksonville was 11-8. Dom Capers was coach of the year. Seven Panthers are going to the pro bowl.

The Jaguars had the No. 1-ranked offense in the league. Mark Brunell led the NFL in passing yards and rushing yards for a quarterback. He is even now being called the next Steve Young.

These two teams went to the finals in their respective conferences outlasting or defeating such perennial powerhouses as San Francisco, Dallas, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh.

Jacksonville was one win away from becoming only the fourth wild card team to make the Super Bowl in the last 15 years. How can these be expansion teams?

To give another example of how amazing this is, the last wave of expansion was in 1976. In the 20 seasons that have come and gone since then those two teams, Seattle and Tampa Bay, have one conference championship appearance between the two of them, and believe it or not it was the Buccaneers who made it that far in 1979.

So why are today’s “expansion” teams that much better then the previous set? How did they both arrive in the conference championships in only two years? The answer lies in the front offices of both organizations.

When the cities of Jacksonville and Charlotte were awarded teams they decided to build strong front offices and coaching staffs before worrying about players. The Panthers hired GM Bill Polian, the man who built the mighty Bills teams, and the Jaguars hired Tom Coughlin who instituted a disciplined approach to building a winning team in Jacksonville.

Today Polian is being courted by several teams hoping that he will do for them what he did for Carolina and one of Coughlin’s assistants is now the head coach in San Diego.

I’m not yet ready to name these teams as next year’s Super Bowl matchup. They will have tougher schedules next season as a direct consequence of this year’s success and they will no longer be able to sneak up on anyone. But if these two organizations stay the course that they set two years ago, it shouldn’t be too long before one of these cats is prowling at the Super Bowl.

Kevin Petty is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Carlisle, Iowa. He is unfortunately a Redskins fan.