While in Tampa, The Mag's David Fleming visited a place where the Super Bowl and faith battle for top billing.

Down here in Tampa, it can be a little hard to tell the difference between football and religion.

After all, the main event in both sects takes place on Sunday. They both have 24-hour cable channels that feature pasty-faced cartoons preaching hollow cliches. They both feature weird costumes, odd symbols and loud chants. Both measure success by attendance. Both have parking problems, seating hierarchies and memorabilia. In the church you tithe. In football you become a UNLV booster. What is heaven if not just a big luxury suite in the sky?

There are divisions in both football and the church. Both have saints. Both have corruption.

Both have false prophets.

Like Ray Lewis, who started this whole notion when he had the audaciousness to compare himself to Jesus.

Good Lord.

I hope Ray knows his playbook better than the Good Book.

Now, before you and your church youth group start your hate e-mail campaign, I'm no pagan. My column head shot (you know, the one with the black eyeballs) just makes me look like one. And I really wanted to ring God up and ask him about all this ... but Brian Billick wasn't taking any phone calls.

So I went to the source, First Baptist Church of Indian Rocks, Fla., one of the largest churches in the area, with a congregation (or is it season-ticket holders?) of more than 6,000. The FBC has decided since they can't beat the Super Bowl's true believers, they're gonna go ahead and join 'em.

What I learned quickly inside the FBC's massive auditorium is that football versus religion is like most Super Bowls -- it's an absolute blowout. It's not even close. After all, when was the last church service that brought a billion people together? (How sad is that?)

Here on Sunday night, like many of the churches in Tampa, the FBC moves its service to an earlier time slot and then uses its state-of-the-art video system to broadcast the game inside the sanctuary. They offer stadium food and banners and contests. One church official told me they actually expect attendance to go up because of the special broadcast. (I can see why. If I didn't actually have a credential for the game, I might join the church just to watch the Super Bowl here on their huge video screens.)

"We can party too!" yelled one woman. "Christians like to have fun, you know. The only difference is, we won't have headaches the next morning."

"Unless the Bucs are playing," chimed in a grandmotherly woman named Flo. (Do all churches have someone named Flo?) "Then we feel worse."

"That's a low blow, Flo," I said. "... Well, not really, I just wanted to say that sentence out loud."

I gathered from speaking to Flo that Lewis' little sermon nearly made her ill and that God doesn't really care who wins the Super Bowl. Turns out, He has more important things to do on Sunday.

"Like NASCAR?" I asked.

Flo shot me what can only be described as a die-hard-Browns-fan-meets-Art-Modell-in-a-dark-alley look..

And just like that, I had found another strong similarity between football and religion. Members of both groups do not, in the least bit, find me funny.

"The world would be a much different place if people could get as excited about religion as they are right now about the Ravens and the Giants," said Bill Austin, a member of the church's mission team. "You see the athletes crossing themselves and pointing [to the sky] and you see fans following these teams so fervently and a lot of that, I think, is displaced faith."

Amen to that.

You can reach David Fleming at flemfile@aol.com.