The ordinary bowl

Parity in the NFL means there are no Super teams

With the Super Bowl fast approaching, the National Football League has a problem: Does it have any teams that are good to enough to play in the Super Bowl? This is a real dilemma, because if the NFL can't produce any modern teams like those great juggernauts of old, squads truly capable of playing in the Super Bowl, how can we watch Super Bowl commercials?

But the league is delighted with its policy that may be called "competitive correctness", seeking, as it does, to make sure that no one team is any better than any of the others.

Apparently, everybody got the memo except the Cincinnati Bengals.

Euphemistically, in this kinder, gentler gridiron universe, this arrangement is sweetly referred to as parity. In a more objective world, it's known as universal mediocrity. At Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone, all the children are above average. At Lake Tagliabue, all the teams are just average.

Now, to be sure, universal mediocrity has its advantages. Certainly it's better than baseball's system, which, to borrow from the Republican lexicon, is athletic class warfare. In baseball, the Yankees and a few other rich kids are the only teams with any chance, and everybody else is the Cincinnati Bengals. In the NFL, though, everybody is just one year away from playing in the Super Bowl, which has been manifestly proved the last four years, as the Falcons, Rams, Ravens and Patriots all survived, coming out of nowhere and somehow managing not to be voted off the island. The NFL isn't a league anymore so much as it is a reality show. Who will be this year's winning NFL bachelorette?

Yes, it's nice that everybody but the Bengals has a chance, but it's also true that flatlining is against the natural order of sports. Except possibly for the aberrational World War II years, this is really the first sustained period in the history of the NFL when there has been no showcase team. Not since the 1930s has the National Hockey League failed for long not to have at least a mini-dynasty. Only for a period in the 1980s did baseball not put up one model champion. Essentially, the National Basketball Association has never once in its history gone more than a couple seasons without one dominant franchise. Sports is not meant to be egalitarian, and it's the way of the world to have some superior team at the top of the tree, there for us to admire and for the other clubs to try to knock off.

Television ratings really tell the NFL story. Whereas the ratings for the Sunday games this season -- essentially, that is, the home team audience -- are up, Monday Night Football's ratings went down. That's because Monday Night is a national game, and the NFL doesn't have any national teams anymore.

Universal mediocrity is a perfectly reasonable choice that the NFL has manipulated. The system is maintained by a strict salary cap, by the draft, and by the fact that there are only so many good quarterbacks to go around, and, on any given Sunday, a bunch of them are injured. Certainly it's nice that fans can believe their team is only a lucky bounce away from being this year's Patriots. But the NFL has sacrificed excellence on the altar of expectation. I don't know, maybe I'm an elitist, but I always thought the big leagues were supposed to be about being the best, not just about being pretty good.

Oh well, at least the Super Bowl commercials still go for high quality. Who do you think will be better, Willie Nelson for H&R Block or the Osbournes for Pepsi Twist?

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

Related information

Stories

Previous Frank Deford Columns

Multimedia

Visit Video Plus for the latest audio and video