ColbyCosh.com

Man, that is a huge pet peeve of mine. Any given Sunday MY ASS.

You're a writer-type-guy, Cosh. Can you just coin a word that can be used correctly (in lieu of 'parity' being used incorrectly) that means, "Just because you sucked/dominated last year doesn't mean you can't dominate/suck this year!"

Besides, he's wrong about the Patriots being the first to go 16-0. The Miami Dolphins had a perfect season in 1972.(17-0-0, with the Super Bowl.)What makes last year's New England Patriots special is that they have a 19-game winning streak.

He also has this charmingly insane bit:

"No team has repeated as Super Bowl champions since the 1997-98 Denver Broncos. The closest thing to a dynasty of late has been the New England Patriots, who won three Super Bowls in four seasons."

The Pats did indeed win 3 bowls in four seasons from 2002-2005.

Even that doesn't express how consistently good they have been from 2001-today: the two times they missed qualifying for the playoffs in the 21st century, it was because they tied for 1st in their division and lost on tiebreakers.

Matt: the word is "random."

I'm too lazy to run the numbers, but it's also worth saying that while parity may be up or down, there is a large amount of roster fluidity in the NFL, (short player careers, nature of the player contracts and salary cap considerations...the number of players should mitigate against this somewhat, but in practice it doesn't), and I think that goes some way to explaining the variance in year-to-year performance of teams.

Oh, and Detroit last had a winning season in 2000, and has won one playoff game since 1957.

Bonus: a commenter on the article makes the same point about the Pats inherent repeat. One Star reader clicked the rating button for "disagree" with that comment!

I wish all youse football guys'd give some attention to Formula 1 racing. Apparently there will be a lot of changes for 2009. But in recent years at least (and probably earlier than that), one or two teams have been consistent contenders while several others are known as midfielders or back-enders.

These slower guys can spend nearly as much money on development as the leaders, or at least drop your jaw to the same depth, but will then talk only of aspiring to be in the "points" at the finish (top 8 out of 20+ entrants). They share no daydreams of victory.

If some of the casual brainpower that floods the NFL every week were given to F1, I'd know whether or not to pursue a renewed fascination with the sport. (It's much better than when I was a kid; appealing young drivers almost never die anymore, are almost never burned, and only infrequently maimed.)

Last year Miami won the last game of the regular season to go 1-15. I was hoping they would go 0-16 and thus become the only team to have both perfect records (along with their 17-0 in 1972, of course, and at that time the D-Lions hadn't achieved their 0-16 perfection yet).

I'm not sure I see this the same way CC does. The fact that the Lions can be so pathetic for so long (as compared with the Dolphins bouncing back from 1-15 to a playoff spot this year) is an indication of how incredibly bad their ownership and management must be. The NFL lacks parity, you say? Compared to what? Baseball and hockey?

Hey, happy new year and best wishes.

"No team has repeated as Super Bowl champions since the 1997-98 Denver Broncos. The closest thing to a dynasty of late has been the New England Patriots, who won three Super Bowls in four seasons."

The Pats did indeed win 3 bowls in four seasons from 2002-2005.

On the Internet, the word "fail" is used too often. However, someone who does not notice that a team cannot win three Super Bowls in four years without repeating once really did fail math.

The fact that the Lions can be so pathetic for so long (as compared with the Dolphins bouncing back from 1-15 to a playoff spot this year) is an indication of how incredibly bad their ownership and management must be. The NFL lacks parity, you say? Compared to what? Baseball and hockey?

Yes, absolutely compared to baseball. There is no denying that the NFL has had one of its greatest eras of parity in the last ten years-- but that doesn't bring it close to the parity of baseball in the 1980s, for example. 1978 to 1992, 13 different baseball champions, with the Twins and Dodgers the only repeats. Only 17 different franchises have ever won a Super Bowl, going back to 1967. (Give the Baltimore Colts to either the Indy Colts or the Ravens, either way it doesn't add a team.) Granted, four teams won for the first team from 2000 to 2003 (and all subsequent winners have won before), so that was a period of unusual parity-- one that meant that the NFL now finally has had more champions ever than baseball did in one 15 year period.

The NFL has had a repeat champion more recently than baseball. The NFL had fewer champions in the 1980s and 1990s-- for example, from 1987 to 1996, only four different teams won the Super Bowl. Now, if you go back into the non-free agent era, it's different of course. If you examine statistics like percentage of teams going to the playoffs, MLB has far greater parity-- the only advantage for the NFL is that more teams go to the playoffs in any given year, and a single elimination tournament with more teams allows more upsets. But are upsets "parity?" (On a side note, both teams have seen dramatic wild card success recently.)

Or you could count regular season statistics. Certainly no one in MLB ever goes undefeated or 0-16. It is, however, a shorter season and the pitching matchups change things. OTOH, that would seem to make it far harder for a team to have the sort of dramatic turnaround that Tampa Bay (or, a few years back, Detroit, or previous Florida) had in one season.

NFL parity fans have a tendency to dismiss all examples of non-parity in the NFL as simply good coaching/ownership, etc., whereas somehow any issues in baseball are structural. One must assume that's because they're working from a certain premise-- "the salary cap in the NFL means that every team can succeed / in baseball they can't." Institutions that in one's mind enforce a sort of equality of opportunity is not necessarily the same thing as parity, though.

And note that the salary cap can increase the power of clever dynasties. The Detroit Tigers a few years back were able to spend themselves back into contention, also by being smart. Poor teams have to overpay for players in order to compensate for players wanting to play on winners. But if everyone pays the same salary, a poor team can't do that. If everyone pays the same salary, players will always want to play on winners and recently successful teams if they can, hurting parity.

Screw NHL hockey. Canada vs Russia was one of the best games that this casual, indifferent consumer of hockey has ever seen.

There's like one NHL game every decade that matches the intensity.

There were several during the Oilers 2006 SCF run alone.

CJ -- Miami did not win the last game of the season last year. They started 0-13, beat Baltimore, then lost two more games.