so phil was telling me that the nfl is a shoddy product. he didn't give me tooo much evidence, but he stuck with "all the teams play the same" and "everyone is equal". i took this to chad, and chad said "yes, everyone is equal, and this parity DOES make the nfl mediocre". i wrote out a huge response to chad, and i think i want to share it with all the nfl-lovin peeps out there.
note: this has been edited for form and grammar. the content is basically the same
i like the nfl. i like watching it week to week. i like the strategy. i like it that on any given week, in any given game, you don't know who is going to win before, so watching the game is actually interesting, because you can see what seperates one team from another.
"the nfl has too much parity" is an overused, simplistic line, because while the talent might be similar, and any team might be good, they don't get good by default. there are specific moments, and since the teams are so close to each other, there are specific plays that end up defining which teams are good and which aren't. you can see them.
you can see the browns not blocking this blitzing linebacker on this one play, so a pass got rushed and they didn't convert a third down, thats one of the reasons they lost to the eventual super bowl champs. or you can see that the colts decided to run edge up the middle one time too many and the pats never were surprised by that decision, which means the colts have to go to new england to play the championship game instead of the friendly rca dome. or you can see the lions call a play that the defense saw coming and the resulting interception led to a loss. i mean, you can see these things, they are tangible, and they are the one or two or three plays that seperate the elite from the rest.
if it was true parity, we wouldn't have the pats go on a huge winning streak or the vikings implode or whatever, everyone would be 8-8 and every game would be decided by a last second fg or something, which would be exciting for about 2 seconds before we realized it was boring because it happened so often. but the nfl is decidedly not like that, the talent is somewhat equal but the playcalling, the strategy, the heart pushes some teams over other teams.
its not just some random crapshoot. the patriots, the eagles, the ravens (bleh), the rams, the titans - these teams have been consitently good. the browns (bleh), the bears, the cardinals - these teams have not. "parity blah blah" is just some stupid bullshit they sell on around the horn.
for phil, or why i love the nfl
1127-august05-2004
comments
re: god chad
from: niv (2004-08-05 11:42:12)
no one was comparing sports. your baseball stuff is irrelevant. talk about football in terms of football.
re: mistake in my last title: their=they're
from: chad (2004-08-05 11:48:25)
it was a comparison, niv. i was explaining why i like baseball and what it is about baseball that i like so much to point out, by comparison, what the nfl is missing.
re: but chad...
from: niv (2004-08-05 11:49:50)
you can't compare the sports. if there were 162 games in the nfl season, you could probably come to a greater conclusion of who would win which division and who would win a '3 game series' or whatever. but there are 16 games in the nfl season. love it or leave it.
re: god
from: ken (2004-08-05 13:51:53)
if there were 162 games in an NFL season i doubt any player could get through a whole season without injury. Maybe the FG kicker. :p
re: nfl=suck
from: phil (2004-08-05 14:43:40)
so this post is going to go on a long time and niv is going to say that it doesn't make sense or offer any proof, but somone out there will probably agree with me. i dont have the nfl, but it isn't fun anymore. back in the 80's and 90's when we were kids the 49ers (and their 5 SB championships) and the cowboys were dominant. they were the yankees of football. now we dont have that anymore. to me the turning point is SB 25, when the giants had much less talent and beat buffalo by holding the ball for 40 min. thad likes to say that the devil and their zone killed the nhl, well the giants and the lessons from that game killed the nfl. there are no dominant teams, that's why it was so surprising for the pats to win so many games in a row. teams like the ravens, patriots, and the like aren't fun to watch. i can only watch so many dump offs over the middle and 10-7 games before i want to kill myself. maybe the defenses are just getting faster and stronger and its stifling the offense, maybe teams have figured out that this way of playing allows them to move the ball down the field and get it to their skill players with less risk than chucking it down the field (because qb's now aren't as good and can't make those passes as well as qb's in the 80s could) and this gives them the best chance of winning. anyway, besides a handful of teams it seems that everyteam runs the same boring offense (why do you think people get so excited about vermiel's, martz's and spurrier's offensive schemes) and i hate it, its boring. i watch the games, but i agree with chad, i like to watch (some of) the games, but following the nfl is a nightmare. last night half an hour of sportscenter was about quincy carter and TO and mcnabb. its august, who cares right now. find me after the world series and then i'll care.
re: I'm acting like I know something about sports, which i clearly dont. Bear with me.
from: ken (2004-08-05 15:23:31)
so NCAA football is a lot better then, phil? I wonder how much of it is the massive egos in the NFL. Now that everyone can be traded around, there's less 'team' conhesive-ness and more individual stardom, especially on offense. Much like how we moan and complain how NCAA basketball is SO MUCH better than the NBA, because the kids playing really want that championship, the same is probably happening in football.
re: silly ken
from: niv (2004-08-05 15:30:35)
yeah, you tell me nfl players don't care
if anyone followed phil's long-winded nostalgic filled rant, let me know. i think he just said he hates the nfl cuz all the quarterbacks aren't joe montana
re: i don't know anything about sports either.....
from: zack (2004-08-05 15:39:03)
....and that's why i still like to watch them. is the nfl really changing, or is your perception changing? back when you were a kid and you just watched it because it was fun and exciting, you never thought of any of this stuff. but that doesn't mean it wasn't going on. maybe the nfl sucks (for those of you that think it does) cause you guys know too much about it, and take it too seriously....
re: take it too seriously?
from: chad (2004-08-05 15:59:53)
So you are telling me that if I just ignored everything surrounding football, stopped thinking on Sunday's and laughed throughout all the games, then I would enjoy football? I don't understand this "take it too seriously" stuff. And Phil makes some reasonable points, the problem is that the offense he is talking about, with all the dump offs and stuff is exactly what the 49ers ran throughout the 90's. It's called the west coast offense and San Francisco ran the best and original version of it.
Also, claiming the giants had less talent than the Bills is crazy. I can't remember who it was that wrote the column about the bills on espn.com Page 2 recently, but those Bills teams were all supremely overrated when you look at their numbers. The Giants were the better team and STILL proved to be a better team without their quarterback, which says a lot. The turning point in the NFL was after the Cowboy dynasty, since when there hasn't been a consistently good team. That Atlanta freaking Falcons played in a Super Bowl recently. The Carolina Panthers were in it last year. And you could see this coming from the time that two second year franchises played in their respective conference championship games.
re: I'm acting like I know something about sports, which i clearly dont. Bear with me. (part deux)
from: ken (2004-08-05 16:06:16)
isn't this all related to the salary cap though? in baseball teams can keep high profile players with them for a long time, Jeter and the Yankees being a prime example. as soon as the NFL had the cap set on them, free agents started turning up left and right as teams had to shuffle their roster around to free up cash. hence, no dynasties can form because having a core of superstars ends up costing too much.
re: exactly
from: zack (2004-08-05 16:21:31)
that's exactly what i'm saying. its a game. enjoy it for what it is: an exciting and upredictable physical and stratigic competition. calling the nfl mediocre because its UN-predictable, seems to be a contradicition. the more evenly matched the teams are, the more unpredictable the results of any given match-up are, the more exciting both the single games, and the whole season will be. i hated watching football as a kid because you knew it was going to be the 49ers or the cowboys...what's the point.
i can see how following a sport when its un-predictable could be frustrating, but its also more exciting. where's the fun in watching a whole season play out when you're already 90% sure of the outcome.
i fully agree with what niv said about strategy as well. when physicality and talent are evenly matched, all that's left is to work for it. and that's fun to watch.
re: for shame
from: niv (2004-08-05 16:29:46)
no one else cares that the colts have all their talent on offense but just enough defense to be a good team that really played the pats much closer than they should have in an excellent afc championship game (other than manning's ints). i mean, thats ALL coaching and strategy and preparedness. and it gets no respect when someone oversimplifies and says all these teams are the same and run the same plays and have the same talent.
and chad your response was alternately attacking and praising phil's response. it was madness!!
finally, ken - shut up.
re: my long-winded response
from: thad (2004-08-05 16:34:01)
the only reason the 49ers won all their championships is because they cheated the salary cap for about a decade, and the only reason the cowboys won theirs is because the vikings made the worst trade in nfl history for herschel walker. ok, these aren't entirely true, but they are both based in fact.
anyways, i don't understand why parity is bad. it would be bad if every team did go 8-8, but this isn't the case. teams that draft well and use their cap space well (patriots, eagles, titans) consistently do well, and teams that don't (cards, bears, redskins) do poorly.
the reason that teams like the falcons and panthers made the super bowl recently is not because of parity, although they may have made the playoffs due to parity. they got to the super bowl based heavily on the fact that the nfl employs one-game playoffs, and the best team doesn't always win in just one game. of course, this is why other sports use 7 game series (which of course doesn't work in the nfl), but even then, wild card teams make it to and win the world series.
since the nfl only has a 16-game schedule, it is impossible for them to create equal and balanced schedules for all of the teams, like they do a reasonably good job of in baseball (interleague notwithstanding). this is why bad teams get easy schedules and good teams get hard schedules. and this has a profound impact on why there is so much turnover in who makes the playoffs. i don't think this is a bad thing. i for one am tired of listening to stuff about the yankees-red sox, and watching the damn braves win the division every damn year, and i don't think it would be such a bad thing to see all those three teams slip and miss the playoffs every so often.
granted, i don't think it's a bad thing to have a yankees-like team, that all the other teams try and shoot for, but with unbalanced schedules and a suprisingly strict salary cap (2 things that baseball doesn't have), it's unlikely to happen. instead, you get short lived dynasties, based on excellent coaching and drafting. the steelers, the 49ers, the cowboys, the broncos (to some extent... might have been longer if elway hadn't been old and td didn't break himself), and maybe now, the patriots. all these teams still carry a considerable amount of mystique, and you can't tell me every team in the league isn't gunning for the patriots this year, much in the same way people do with the yankees.
in conclusion, parity isn't terrible, it's also relatively unavoidable, consistently good and bad teams still remain, football and baseball are too different to accurately compare, and they are still the 2 best pro sports out there.
re: my problem with unpredicatability...
from: chad (2004-08-05 17:01:29)
Is that it makes everything meaningless. There aren't upsets in the NFL. And the surprise teams aren't a surprise. The Pistons winning the title this year was exciting cause no one thought they could do it and because they were a heavy underdog who pulled off a big time upset. It was stunning. Everyone was surprised (well, except me, which Geoff can explain). So what was stunning about the last NFL season? Nothing. Yeah, the Panthers weren't anyone's Super Bowl pick, but it also wasn't surprising that they made it. Because its the NFL and anything can happen. And when anything regularly does happen, it loses its mystique and becomes less exciting.
This is why college football is still better. Because when Ohio State upsets Miami people are shocked. Because when a #1 team somehow falls to an unheralded smaller program, it means something. There is still drama in the games. The NFL has dramatic plays but there is no drama to the season because there is no story line.
re: republican girls suck
from: phil (2004-08-06 09:51:12)
i agree with chad's last response, ncaa is more fun to watch (and the video game is more fun to play too, but that's neither here nor there) because you're surprised by the surprises. if the bengals or the browns were this year's panthers, or 2001's patriot's or 2000's ravens or 1999's rams. the point is that worst to first happens to often to mean anything anymore, and i dont think its totally a function of coaching, strategy, etc....its more a function of free agency, and diff. in strength of schedule.
inevitably someone will say, what about the d-backs (who were bad for baseball...there, i said it), the angels, and the marlins. the beauty of those world series is that, like the pistons this year, those teams weren't expected to win, actually they weren't even expected to get there, thus the surprises are still surprising.
thad brought up the unbalanced schedules, mentioning that they can't all have the same schedule because its only 16 games. this is true, but all of the teams in each division could have relatively the same schedule. each team would play 6 games against its division, home and home, then one division would face off against another division in the conference, that'd be 10 games, then each division would face off against a division in the other conference, that's 14 games, finally you could have 2 random games where you can schedule matchups that you'd want to see or regional rivalries, i.e. giants/jets, ravens/skins, 49ers/raiders. this would make the schedule more fair and hopefully get rid of some of the randomness in the league that makes it unbearable.
also, i've had run ins each of the last 3 weeks with GOP girls. they're so illogical (i'm sure someone is going to point out the irony in that after analyzing my post) and they get so upset and pissed off whenever you question them about politics, politics which they brought up as the subject of conversation. anyway, how about those st. louis cardinals.
re: phil is accidentally brilliant
from: niv (2004-08-06 09:58:19)
so let's see, each team plays everyone else in its division, then each division plays another division, and then like 2 games that are based on strength of schedule... that sounds like exactly what the nfl does now.
re: GOP Girls?
from: zack (2004-08-06 10:10:43)
i've never met a female republican in my life...much less a young one.
god that's a terrifying thought...
re: couple of things
from: phil (2004-08-06 12:20:46)
yeah, GOP girls are scary. the bad thing is that they're hotter than dem. girls, so you kinda have to deal with the ridiculousness, much like my friends have to deal with mine.
i dont want all qb's to be joe montana. montana to taylor is SB 23 is my nightmare SB moment. i do want qb's that are good though, not qb's who aren't given the chance to make throws because the team is afraid to turn the ball over. i'd rather watch marino or peyton manning than watch the type of offense the ravens ran with trent dilfer or the bucs ran with brad johnson, and yeah, i'm putting tommy brady in the category with dilfer and johnson (not hating though, i love tommy, but still, let him chuck it down the field so we can see how good he really is).
also, i think the bills were much better than those giants in SB 25. can you name anyone on the giants offense besides hostetler (simms was on the bench hurt, he was hurt earlier in the season when the bills beat the giants), otis anderson, mark bavaro, and jumbo elliot. mark ingram, steven baker, howard cross, and maurice carthon aren't exactly intimidating. the bills had james lofton, jim kelly, thurman, and andre reed. i think i'll take the bill's off. the giants D had old man LT, old man carl banks, pepper johnson, gary reasons, wilbur marshall, and everson walls. the bills D had cornelius bennett, darryl talley, bruce smith, and mark kelso. i think the bill's D is pretty decent. the bill's blew out the raiders like 52-10 in the AFC title game. they went to 4 straight super bowls. how can they be overrated?
re: if their sellin...
here's the thing: in baseball you have the same "any given day" thing going on. RARELY does a team sweep a season series with another team. It's pretty difficult to sweep any 3 game series, let alone 8-20 games over the course of a season.
And the strategy is there too. You can see Maddux out-think a hitter. you can see that Johnny Damon wasn't set in the right place in center and so he couldn't get to a double that should have been an out. You can see Dave Roberts get gunned at the plate with no one out when he could have tied the game a minute or two later.
But in baseball, while there is this "anyone can win" thing going on, there are mountains to climb to get there. You get better by rebuilding, by drafting well, by trading well, by stockpiling talent. Once you get good, you still have to beat out other teams in a penant race and at this point, in every division in baseball except maybe the NL West, you have to beat an established contender just to make the post-season. And once you do that, you have to take on a team like the Braves or Cardinals who have been good for a while. Or the Yankees or Red Sox or A's who are constantly in the post-season and among baseball's elite.
But in the NFL, except for a team or two, this isn't the case. the Titans and Eagles have been consistently good lately. everyone else fluctuates. who is going to win the AFC North this year? Who the hell knows?? is there even a favorite other than "not the browns." And if the browns, who should stink, made the playoffs, would anyone really be THAT surprised? over a 16 game season, when the teams are all reasonably even in talent, too many flukey things happen. a couple years ago the browns made the playoffs at 8-8, but were a few plays away from being 12-4 or 4-12. the bears went 13-3 a few years ago and deserved to be 7-9 at best. any individual game, i agree, is exciting. anyone can win, each game matters a lot. thats why i enjoy watching the nfl. but its also why i don't enjoy FOLLOWING the nfl.
maybe i will flesh out this comment a bit better and put it on ireofchad.blogspot.com for all to see.