Welcome to the NFL: a world of one-shot wonders. Dynasties, as it were, are history. Gone are the juggernauts with their legendary coaches (Lombardi, Landry, Walsh), Hall of Fame quarterbacks (Staubach, Bradshaw, Montana) and inspired defenses (“The Steel Curtain,” “The Doomsday Defense,” “The Killer B’s”). The NFL, that most corporate of leagues, has leveled the playing field with its unique brand of socialism, a host of policies aimed at afflicting the strong teams and bolstering the weak. As a result, the NFL has become pro sports’ biggest crapshoot, with virtually every team–except, of course, the Cincinnati Bengals–suddenly transformed into a potential Super Bowl contender. Of the six teams that made it to the last three Super Bowls, just one had a winning record the previous season.
The league has coveted this chaotic state of affairs–which goes by the benign, if wimpy, tag of “parity”–for the past decade. Two critical ’90s innovations have been most responsible. First, the introduction of a cap on team payrolls made it impossible for winning clubs to retain all their high-priced talent, thus spreading superstars more evenly around the league. Next came uneven schedules. Winning teams were pitted against other winners, while losing clubs got to play softer opposition. In St. Louis’s Super Bowl run, the Rams played just one of their 16 regular-season games against a team with a winning record. The changes have helped produce the desired results; over the past five seasons every NFL team but four (Cincinnati, San Diego, Chicago and Cleveland) has reached the playoffs.
Even for a league that boasts “on any given Sunday…,” the increasingly capricious outcomes have fans and experts wondering if parity has been a good thing for the game. Sportswriters have hammered parity as just another word for mediocrity, a balancing act that has made the NFL a bore in which, as one put it, “nobody is truly awful… and for sure nobody is truly good.” Dan Dierdorf, a top NFL lineman in the ’70s and ’80s and now a CBS analyst, defends the approach. “I’m hard-pressed to find fault with a system that gives the vast majority of teams–and their fans–hope on an annual basis,” he says. But while hometown fans may relish the hope, the lack of any superteams has contributed to declining TV ratings. Moreover, with new teams catapulted to the top so quickly, NFL schedulers can’t guarantee that they’ll feature the hottest clubs on the league’s Sunday- and Monday-night showcases.
Fans are not alone in trying to make sense of the current NFL. Even the savviest coach has trouble analyzing where his team stands. Ravens coach Brian Billick says it wasn’t until well into last season that he realized his team–despite its lack of a talented quarterback and, thus, a significant offensive threat–could still contend for the Super Bowl. (Ravens QB Trent Dilfer became an instant trivia answer as the first “I’m going to Disney World”-er to be dumped the next season.) “If you looked back at the champions over the last 10, 15 years, there was always an offensive presence,” Billick says. “It wasn’t until mid-season that I recognized that although there were some very good football teams out there, there was no dominant team that you looked at and said, ‘Boy, there’s no way we’re going to beat this team’.” Right now there are 31 NFL coaches telling their players much the same thing. But consider the alternatives. Take baseball, where the New York Yankees are gearing up for their fifth World Series championship in six years (and where half the teams were eliminated from contention by budget constraints before opening day). Or the NBA, where the Los Angeles Lakers, even with the bickering Shaq and Kobe, are odds-on for a three-peat. Dynasties may factor in fans’ love affair with sports history, but there is much charm, too, in the genuine suspense the NFL now offers. So who will take Super Bowl XXXVI? Look for a team that didn’t have a winning record, that plays a weak schedule and that’s stuck with a lousy quarterback. Can you say “Washington Redskins”?
