NFL: 2009 Is The Season Of Disparity

Pete Rozelle is rolling over in his grave.

Paul Tagliabue is having fits.

Roger Goodell is pretending that everything is fine.

The first two men in that list worked tirelessly to give the NFL something that most professional and even collegiate sports rarely witness: parity.

Parity (n): equality, as in amount, status, or value

For the first part of this decade, the NFL looked like the perfect example of parity. 

From 2000 to 2008, seven different teams won Super Bowls. 

The turnover in the playoffs from year to year was interesting too.  Different teams rose up every year, usually with several teams nipping at their heals.  Division and wild card races ran to the final weekends of the season.  It was exciting.

Sure, there were stinkers.  The Detroit Lions haven't had much success since the 1950s.  The Raiders fell off sharply after their 2002 Super Bowl appearance. 

There were also dominant teams.  The New England Patriots won three titles, the Pittsburgh Steelers two, and the Indianapolis Colts were routinely regular season dynamos. 

But by and large, the league had unbelievable parity both in talent dispersion and results.

Then last year, the unthinkable finally happened.

The Detroit Lions, stumbling for years, failed to win a game.  The St. Louis Rams, Kansas City Chiefs, Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals were punchlines at best.

Ten of 32 teams finished with losing records.  Half finished at 8-8 or worse.  The San Diego Chargers won a division without a winning record.

Suddenly things didn't seem fair anymore.

The talent gap began to show.  Teams like Detroit and Oakland had become incapable of fielding an NFL-caliber lineup.  Players didn't want to go to those places, fearing their careers would end in disappointment.

Almost halfway through the 2009 season, things are actually getting worse.

St. Louis, Tampa Bay, and Tennessee are winless.  Tampa Bay and St. Louis don't even look like they could win a game this season given a handicap. 

Just above them, Cleveland, Kansas City, Oakland, Carolina, Detroit, Washington, Seattle, and Buffalo all look forlorn.  Washington has become a joke of the same caliber as Oakland.  Cleveland has the worst talent level in the NFL and continues to trade away anyone who could help turn the team around.  Detroit is perpetually rebuilding along with Kansas City and the others all look like teams with massive holes in their rosters.

Realistically looking at schedules, the Rams and Buccaneers could both finish 0-16, joined in the ranks of sub-.500 teams by all of the above franchises and also Chicago, Jacksonville and possibly as many as two more teams.  That brings the total to as many as 15 of the leagues 32 franchises.

Last weekend was the perfect indictment of this alarming spiral.  Of the 13 matchups played in Week 7, only two finished with a margin of victory less than ten points.  Of the remaing 11, only two were within ten points.  Of the remaining nine, six victories came by more than twenty points. 

It's becoming hard for teams like New England and Indianapolis to find good competition.

Okay, so now we know what the problem is.  The league has way too many disasters and too few competitors.

Where do we go?

The draft was engineered to fix this problem.  The teams who struggle the most draft the earliest.  The problem is that teams aren't drafting well or are trading their high picks away for lower picks or more players.

So the draft isn't the solution.

The league does enjoy a great parity in revenue and revenue sharing, so it doesn't appear funneling money to the poorer performers would help.  Plus, unlike baseball, the salary cap precludes the possibility of buying your way out of the basement.

Could leaving it alone work?  That's doubtful as well.  Leaving it alone and relatively unchanged for a decade has produced this staggering fall.

Perhaps there is no solution?  I don't think I believe that either.  For a league to enjoy parity for the better part of a decade and good competitive balance for longer, there has to be something that was done right.

The league could attempt to get involved with the mismanaged teams.  Al Davis, the Ford Family, and Randy Lerner all have a poor track record of mismanagement.  But this leads to perceived prejudice, which could be worse than a tipping of the competitive balance.

The best solution I can come up with is for Commissioner Roger Goodell to stop ignoring the problems and pretending that they don't exist.  Until the man at the top recognizes what's wrong and that action must be taken, the league's best minds on the topic will be held at bay.