While enduring the audio of my Chicago Bears being less execrable than the St. Louis Rams (I am loathe to use words like "win" or "victory" to describe their performance), it reinforced in a visceral way what I assume everyone else has noticed just by looking at the standings, namely the severe bifurcation in the NFL this year. After 12 weeks, we have two unbeaten teams. Has this ever happened before in NFL history? Not so coincidentally, we have not one, not two, but THREE one-win teams and one two-win team (and of the five total wins garnered by those 4 teams, two of them have been against each other).
"Parity" has been the watchword of the NFL during the salary cap era, and there's a whole bunch of largely indistinguishable teams in the middle of the league, but for whatever reason this year, the good ones are very very good, and the bad ones are bloody awful.
At some point I'll probably run standard deviations of wins by league for the last 20+ years to test the theory that league has had more parity post-salary cap than in the past, but it sure seems like this year is an outlier for any era.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Parity Schmarity
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Finally, someone smart is posting here.
ReplyDeleteDer, what?
ReplyDelete"Finally, someone smart is posting here."
ReplyDeleteHuh? Where?!?
Make sure to look at playoff appearances by number of teams over the last ten to twenty years, smart-guy. ;-)
ReplyDeleteI see parity less as a show of every team being clumped in the middle, and more of a power distribution. i.e. More teams have the ability to compete sooner in football than they do in baseball. This is only somewhat true, as some teams are destined for failure due to terrible management. Plus, we've had two teams that have won multiple Superbowls this decade, and two more that are in the playoffs I think every year this decade except one.
Part of it is likely that due to small sample size of games, bad teams have the ability to sneak into post-season games by virtue of picking up a couple wins on luck. A team that's normally a .400 team snaps up four extra wins in close games on somewhat lucky circumstances, they're 10-6 and headed to the playoffs. In baseball, they've gotta pick up an extra 20 - 25 wins, at a minimum, to pull off a feat like that...