Intersting article about parity in the NFL being dead.

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I think there was another recent discussion about this but i'm too lazy to find the thread.

My belief is the root cause of this is the half dozen or so really bad owners in the league. Al Davis, Snyder, the Fords, the Glazers, the Browns owner and Ralph Wilson have kept their teams as bottom feeders for years.

With the exception of Snyder they rarely spend anywhere near the cap, and generally hire incompetent boobs to run their football operations. Often hiring very bad coaches as well. To be fair to the Raiders, they can't get a decent coach to work for Davis.

The rest of the teams go up and down, even teams like the Pats and Colts don't have all good years. There is typically a 50% turnover in playoff teams every year, and examples like Miami's worst to first turnaround last year are not that rare.

But the teams have to be willing to spend and have to find good people to run their operations instead of bean counters.
 
Here's the money shot:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/kerry_byrne/10/28/parity/1.html
There's no perfect explanation for the death of parity, especially in the wake of the league's open efforts to keep it alive. But it's obvious the league's efforts to legislate equality have failed.

Here's one guess why: the NFL, with so many players and so many coaches and so much turnover and so many moving parts, is all about management. And, right now, management has never been more important.

Humans are not equal in talent, whether they're in the front office, on the sidelines or in the huddle, and the notion that a few rules will "level the playing field" is being mocked openly on the field right now.

What the NFL has done, actually, is create a system that ends up rewarding well managed teams and punishing poorly managed teams. The Colts, Patriots and Steelers continue to fine tune the system year after the year and win year after year. The Browns, Lions and teams like (in recent years) the Redskins make poor and sometimes desperate off-the-field decisions that make them uncompetitive on the field.

Back in the day, before the efforts to "level the playing field," a poorly managed team could splurge for a season or two on talent and compete. Money is the great equalizer. But that weapon has been removed and now, more than ever, not less than ever, NFL teams are dependent upon smart decision-makers and good executives. The NFL has maximized, not minimized, inequality on the playing field by maximizing the importance of management.

It adds up the NFL's crisis of competition, meaning league executives should be afraid. Be very afraid.

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It's not just about quality of management though: it's stability of ownership and having a succession plan in place when you invariably lose your top coaches and front office talent. It's also about developing cohesive relationships between coaching and the front office, so that one need not feel it has to outshine the other.

It's also about "cash over cap" allowances, if used correctly, ... and getting yourself a franchise quarterback. It's about a lot of things, but invariably at the top of the list I've learned over time, is having a great owner.

Cheers to Kraft. :toast:
 
Baseball has more parity than the NFL does. Only 3 MLB teams had winning percentages under .400 in 2009. That means everyone else was (by NFL standards) "7-9 or better."

In 2008, the NFL had 9 teams with a winning percentage under .400. 6 of those teams were under .300.

The Washington Nationals posted the worst winning percentage in MLB this season (.364). That equates to about 5.5 wins in an NFL season.
 
3 Point Stan said:
Baseball has more parity than the NFL does. Only 3 MLB teams had winning percentages under .400 in 2009. That means everyone else was (by NFL standards) "7-9 or better."

In 2008, the NFL had 9 teams with a winning percentage under .400. 6 of those teams were under .300.

The Washington Nationals posted the worst winning percentage in MLB this season (.364). That equates to about 5.5 wins in an NFL season.
Click to expand...
It's true that baseball has more parity than football but that's not news, really.

In baseballl, if a team has a winning percentage of .650, it's off the charts. In football, teams often have winning percentages of .750 or better.

My point is that baseball has a tighter gap between the lowest and highest rungs in terms of winning percentage.
 
harrisonhits said:
I think there was another recent discussion about this but i'm too lazy to find the thread.

My belief is the root cause of this is the half dozen or so really bad owners in the league. Al Davis, Snyder, the Fords, the Glazers, the Browns owner and Ralph Wilson have kept their teams as bottom feeders for years.

With the exception of Snyder they rarely spend anywhere near the cap, and generally hire incompetent boobs to run their football operations. Often hiring very bad coaches as well. To be fair to the Raiders, they can't get a decent coach to work for Davis.

The rest of the teams go up and down, even teams like the Pats and Colts don't have all good years. There is typically a 50% turnover in playoff teams every year, and examples like Miami's worst to first turnaround last year are not that rare.

But the teams have to be willing to spend and have to find good people to run their operations instead of bean counters.
Click to expand...

The Browns owner is Randy Lerner. That dickhead deserves to have his name mentioned. The Browns are in complete chaos & dickhead Lerner refuses to give interviews or answer for the state of the team in public. He does not live in Ohio & he cares more about his London, England soccer club than he does the Browns. I wish he would just sell the team or die. Either is fine.
 
Yeah I never understood teh parity talk. Basically the good teams are good every year and the bad teams are bad, then there is a middle section that goes up and down, but its still the have and the have nots.
 
Management is one key factor.

The one that doesn't get mentioned as much is the lack of a rookie cap. It's actually a disadvantage to pick at the top of the draft the way it is currently set up. Have a couple of consecutive bad years, and even one bust cripples you for half a decade.
 
"Parity" may not have been the correct word to explain what the NFL was trying to do. What they set out to do, and succeeded at, was leveling the playing field in terms of overall talent. Where the playing field isn't level is the same place it has never been level - 'specific' talent - to wit, Quarterback, Head Coach, and 'Team Building' Management.
 
midgar8784 said:
Yeah I never understood teh parity talk. Basically the good teams are good every year and the bad teams are bad, then there is a middle section that goes up and down, but its still the have and the have nots.
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How'd the Pats do without the cap?
 
It would be awesome if the NFL had a relegation system like European soccer. It'd be funny to see the Browns, Rams and Titans lowered to the second division. :coffee:
 
OSUBuckeye said:
The Browns owner is Randy Lerner. That dickhead deserves to have his name mentioned. The Browns are in complete chaos & dickhead Lerner refuses to give interviews or answer for the state of the team in public. He does not live in Ohio & he cares more about his London, England soccer club than he does the Browns. I wish he would just sell the team or die. Either is fine.
Click to expand...

Without wishing to disagree with your comments about Lerner, his team are based in the UK's second largest city, Birmingham.
 
The article raises some interesting points. However, there is a parity of sorts in the form of the salary cap and the draft. At least Football teams have a chance of winning by improving things within their control, i.e. getting good management.

Look at soccer, say, and you see a huge difference. In soccer, you need money to win. You can have the best manager in the world, but he won't keep any players he develops and won't be able to buy the best ones from elsewhere.

A situation like last year, with Arizona nearly winning the SB, or the Pats in 2001-2, simply doesn't happen in the Premier League without someone injecting huge amounts of cash into a club.
 
Flagg the Wanderer said:
Management is one key factor.

The one that doesn't get mentioned as much is the lack of a rookie cap. It's actually a disadvantage to pick at the top of the draft the way it is currently set up. Have a couple of consecutive bad years, and even one bust cripples you for half a decade.
Click to expand...

Definitely. Which leads me to believe that BB will trade away the Raiders 1st rounder in '11. Especially because it will most likely be a top five.
 
I always like the articles that Kerry writes, but I think this one lacks his usual rigor.

Let's pick 2001 as an example of a year when most of the football pundits out there were complaining about parity, and bemoaning the lack of dominant teams such as the Cowboys and 49er teams of the 1990s.

Let's use standard deviation of wins and losses as our metric. If true parity existed, every game would end up in a tie: in other words, the expected result of a game would be a half-win (or a half-loss). And so the standard deviation at the end of the season for all games played by all the teams would be zero.

If there weren't a lot of parity (say 16 teams were 12-4 and the other 16 teams were 4-12), then the standard deviation would be 1.414.

In 2001, the standard deviation for all games played (248 games - 31 teams playing a 16 game schedule) was 1.132.

In 2009, after 103 total games played so far, the standard deviation is 1.012.

So is parity dead? The numbers don't indicate that, unless you think that 2001 isn't a good example of a year when parity reigned. I choose 2001 because the Pats got a bye that year with an 11-5 record. There have been others years (e.g. 2008) when a team with an 11-5 record has missed the playoffs.
 
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