The Cardinals didn't win the SB and had a worse season than the Patriots.
Agreed. But that wasn't the point of bringing up the Cardinals, as you well know. The point was that any team can beat any other team in one game. Sometimes the better team doesn't win any single particular game. Even if that game is the Super Bowl.
Best at all kinds of things.
The purpose of the team is to win the SB.
That's the ultimate goal, yes.
I don't know how one that doesnt can be better than one that does.
Because you're looking at it far too simplistically. Again, let's just step back a moment. What's the goal of any single game? To win the game, right? So the team that wins that game is automatically better than the team that loses that game, right? By your logic, this has to be the case.
How are you defining better?
There are all kinds of metrics out there to help us determine that. Certainly I give plenty of weight to winning the Super Bowl, but the better team does not always win any particular game, including the Super Bowl.
Again, the reason they are a team is to win the SB so the one that does it has to be the best, because they accomplished the singular goal.
Again, the goal of any particular single game is to win it, so the team that wins that game is automatically better than the team that loses it, by your logic. Thus, Arizona is better than the Patriots because they beat the Patriots and achieved their goal while the Patriots did not.
Being better 'most days' isn't the goal of an NFL team. Being the one that wins the SB is.
Right. And if you achieve that goal, you automatically earn the title of *NFL CHAMPION*, no questions asked. But that doesn't automatically make you the "best team" in the NFL.
Put it another way: look at the NCAA Tournament. In 1985, the Georgetown Hoyas had one of the best teams in recent years in men's basketball. They were the defending national champions, and they faced a team in Villanova that they had already beaten twice that year. Going into the championship game, here were the numbers:
Georgetown: 35-2, Big East regular season and tournament champions, beat Villanova twice, #1 seed
Villanova: 24-10, lost twice to Georgetown, #8 seed
By any measure, Georgetown was *significantly* better than Villanova. They proved it over the long haul of the season, they proved it in head-to-head matchups, they proved it statistically. But when they played in the NCAA championship game, Villanova played a perfect, once-in-a-lifetime game, and won by 2.
By your logic, Villanova was a "better" team than Georgetown because they achieved the ultimate goal. But they weren't. They played a game for the ages, something that they could never repeat given a hundred tries (they shot 90% (!) from the floor in the 2nd half, 79% (!) from the floor over the course of the entire game - unheard of before or since). They were not the better team. But they were the better team that night, and they were the NCAA Champions, and that's all that matters.