As most of you know, I write part time for the Washington Post’s “The League” section whenever they ask for some Buccaneer feedback. Here is the front page of The League where you will find my article on Which Suprise Team of this year’s 2-0 bumper crop is truly a surprise. My issue is with some of the comments that are blaming this on (or crediting) parity. Parity is dead my friends, and we buried it back in the springs of 2002 when realignment was done. How does moving a few teams from one division to the next kill parity you may ask? I never thought you’d ask! Joel Thurman who runs the best NFL blog on SB Nation for the KC Chiefs attributes the 2-0 surprise starts (and failures; see Dallas, Minnesota) on the dirty P word. But fast starts and changing of the gaurds have been going on in the NFL for as long as they have been wearing hard shell helmets. Has nothing to do with Parity, which is in fact dead, and thus I will finally explain. Parity was the brain-child of former NFL commissioner Pete Rozell, who imagined a league with such parity, that on any given Sunday any NFL team could be good enough to beat any other good team. Teams going 16-0 or 0-16 was not exciting according to Rozell, other than to the cities whose teams were involved. it took the fun and mystery out of the game. A whole bunch of 8-8 teams with some 10-6 and 6-10, now were talkin! Rozell instituted rules to help the NFL try to come to this happy medium. One of which was the NFL Draft rules, which gives the lower ranked teams the highest draft positions. Poor teams could reload with better talent, and teams that did good would not be able to get their hands on colleges best players. The next step in the plan was scheduling. If you finished last place, Rozell wanted you to play OTHER last place teams. IF you were a division champion, you were supposed to play OTHER division champions. That way Great teams would knock each other off instead of piling up records of 10-0 against inferior teams, and the lower talented teams would not continue to go 0-14, because when you put two 1-5 teams against each other over and over, someone is bound to win. Now maybe it was harder to tell who was good when a poor team had a 4-3 record and so did a very talented team, but thats what the Playoffs were for. Now fast forward to 2002 and realignment, and The NFL changed from two conferences with three divisions each to 4 divisions each, a North, South, East and West, and thus, a champion from each one, and a wild card or two. But the kicker is the scheduling. You see before teams had no idea what their schedule would be the next year until the season was over, because it all depended on where they finished. Now, the NFL has a schedule where every team plays every other team once every 3 or 4 years, and thus the schedule is set in stone for 14 of the 16 games. Only TWO of any teams games are up for grabs and are determined by where that team falls in the standings anymore, just two. So parity in scheduling is dead. Take Tampa Bay last year, a not so good team (To say the least) But they had to play the entire NFC East, one of the best if not THE best divisions in football. Now parity in the draft is still around, but teams can use free agency to replace skilled positions too, so the only real explanation for a bunch of 2-0 suprise teams each year is just the way teams can retool so quickly, not because of parity. Because there is none. This is why you have a 16-0 Patriots team and an 0-16 Lions team all in the same era. Last year 3 teams had no more than 3 wins, with a 14-2, 12-4 and 13-3 team on the other end. 2008 had 4 12-4 or better teams with two 2-14, an 0-16 and a 4-12 team too. Extremes, that is NOT parity. Take 1980; only two 12-4 teams, those were the BEST records. Only one 1-15 record, and a bunch of 4-12,5-11 records too. 8 teams were at .500 or within a game. The whole NFC Central division went like this, 3 teams at 9-7, and two at 5-10-1! That is Parity. 2010 is not, its just creative ways to rebuild teams, and life in the NFL in action; some teams on the rise, some on the decline.
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