Any Given Sunday vs Dynasties

Normally, I would have written a post with my picks for the NFL playoffs, but I was so distracted over the 11-5 Patriots missing the playoffs that I simply forgot to do so before the playoffs started. This was lucky for me, because other than my pick of Baltimore to make the AFC Championship game, I would have looked otherwise pretty silly. I take solace in that I'm not the only one who has no idea how to pick these games.

As a Patriots fan, this year was particularly disappointing, what with Tom Brady going down seven minutes into the season and having the team go 11-5 and still miss the playoffs, not so much for those points in particular but in that the entire league has been wide open all year. It would have been a great year for Mr. Stetson to cruise to his 4th Super Bowl ring, but alas, I digress. The point I've come to consider is this: is the mayhem of this year's "any given Sunday" theme to the playoffs good for the league?

The NFL is a league that, in general, is the best equipped at this time to both promote and actually achieve parity on a regular basis. Between the salary cap, free agency and large rosters, and the overwhelming popularity of the league leading to reasonably balanced revenue streams, competitive balance allows good teams and doormats to change places regularly because the difference between the two is really not so great. Baseball pretends like the luxury tax was a step in this direction, but really there is no better time than this past offseason to illustrate the difference between the have's (Yankees) and have not's (Padres). Basketball is set up similarly to the NFL, but I believe given that a team only uses 9-10 players, if a team like the Celtics keeps Pierce/Garnett/Allen together or a team has a dominant force like MJ, Lebron or Shaq/Kobe, they're going to be some level of good no matter what, long term.

Now, I've always thought parity was a good thing. I never liked teams that were too dominant for too long. Who wants to see the Bulls win six championships in eight years? Who wants to see the Lakers, Cowboys and Patriots win three championships in four years. Or the Yankees four in five years (not me). Parity hit the NFL hard this year - there were no clearly dominant teams, and of the four teams that finished with the best records and received byes to the divisional round of the playoffs, three of them lost this weekend. San Diego was 5-8 at one point and needed a lot of things to go right just to make the playoffs, and knocked off 12-4 Indy. The Eagles needed a world of help in the last week of the season just to make the playoffs at 9-6-1, and find themselves in the NFC Championship game. And although it is not to say that I am not enjoying the games themselves, I find myself really not caring for any team in particular beyond my picks in a pool, and it is not for the lack of Patriots games.

See, I've come to realize that maybe having a small number of dominant teams at any one given time is good for a sport. It gives everyone who doesn't have anything to root for a villain, a rooting interest, generally for the underdog. In the mid-90s, it seemed that the Patriots were incapable of beating the Denver Broncos. I couldn't stand them. They were good, and they were arrogant. And I looked forward to games against them more than any other because I wanted the Pats to finally break through and beat them, time and again. Super Bowl XXXVI was exciting, not only because the Patriots were playing, but they were playing the Greatest Show on Turf, the St. Louis Rams. They were 17 point underdogs, yet I believed they could pull a gigantic upset because of how they had played the Rams in a seemingly insignificant loss in week 10. I'm absolutely sure Giants fans felt the same way in the Super Bowl last year.

Sometimes you have one clearly dominant team to root for or against. Sometimes they fail (Patriots '07, Rams '01, early 90's Bills) and sometimes they prevail anyways and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it (Patriots '03 and '04, mid-90's Bulls, late 90's Yankees). Sometimes you feel good about the dominant team (Elway's Broncos, late '90s) and sometimes you hate them (late 90's Yankees). But in every case, the dominant team evokes strong passion one way or another. Other times you have more than one dominant team that sets up yearly battles of the titans - Pats/Colts, Celts/Lakers (80's), Red Sox/Yankees, etc. Sometimes these are the best of games, given that even more than chamionships are on the line, but bragging rights in big rivalries.

The problem with baseball is that those dominant teams never rotate. The Yankees, Red Sox and other big market teams will usually hover around the top whereas the Royals and Brewers are generally just flashes in the pan. The NFL works better because those teams tend to rotate - from the Steelers, to the 49ers, to the Cowboys, to the Broncos, to the Pats - with the Rams, Chiefs, Bills, Giants, Packers, Colts and so on all mixed in. And most teams that are consistenly miserable for extended periods of time tend to simply be run poorly (see New York Knicks, Detroit Lions), which is not a product of the structure of the sport itself.

Bringing it back to my original point, one might argue that the NFL playoffs this year are exciting because you can't possibly guess what is going to happen next, but I'm not buying it. I could care less about watching two teams that barely made the playoffs facing off in the NFC Championship game. It would be a crime that two #6 seeds could meet in the Super Bowl. And in turn, I've realized that I miss the token dominant team, to either root for or against. So maybe when things seem the least balanced, they are in fact the most balanced of all.