| Authored by Matthew Gordon - 2nd January, 2009 - 1:55 am
 This regular season was a strange one in the NFL. The New England Patriots missed the playoffs at 11-5, the first time since the Denver Broncos did so in 1985. Meanwhile, the 8-8 San Diego Chargers will have a home playoff game in the same conference.
The NFC wasn’t much more logical, with the Detroit Lions finishing 0-16. The Washington Redskins and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 6-2 and 9-3, respectively, managed to cease looking respectable for the last half (Redskins) and quarter (Buccaneers) of the season. The final standings showed only one AFC playoff team with fewer than eleven wins, and the NFC looking similarly fearsome until the balancing effect of the last couple weeks.
Experts and fans alike will see a situation like the one facing the NFL this season and say that it’s a tough year, using the nine-win or ten-win mark as a universal constant. A 10-6 team is generally in the playoffs with no problem; 9-6 teams often clinch a berth going into the season’s final week; and a matchup of two 8-7 teams will often result in one team scoring a playoff spot while the other goes home.
The most basic logic dictates that a team that wins more games than another is the better team. A 10-6 team is better than a 9-7 team, an 11-5 team is better than a 10-6 team, and so on. Strength of schedule obviously factors into this (for instance, does anyone really think the Cardinals are better than the Redskins?) but only to an extent. Within a season, that typically works. There will always be questions, like whether the Titans are really better than the Steelers despite having a better record and having beaten them (hint: as long as Ben Roethlisberger recovers, they’re not), but there always are.
The problem lies in the ludicrous notion of comparing teams in different seasons as though they’d played in the same season. A team with any given record in one season would not necessarily have had that record in any other. This is where schedule becomes important again; the NFC East teams all had to play half of their games this season against either each other, Baltimore or Pittsburgh. To say that the Redskins are comparable to an 8-8 team from another season, or even that the Cowboys and Eagles are comparable to a 9-7 or 9-6-1 team, is absurd.
Then why compare sixth seeds and invent a cut-off line establishing how difficult it apparently is to get into the playoffs? While team record is the ultimate determinant of success, and winning a game speaks for itself, picking one team’s record as a standard doesn’t provide insight into the climate of a conference or a league.
Technically, the league is always equally tough every season. For each win, there’s a loss, and vice versa. The end result of every game is a .500 record for the league. (For winning percentage purposes, a tie is counted as half a win and half a loss, so the .500 mark still holds true for the Eagles/Bengals game.) People tend to look at teams’ records in isolation or as a playoff bracket rather than on a larger scale, though, so there’s a distorted perspective that develops.
This season was not unique because it had so many over-.500 teams jockeying for playoff position. It was unique because it had so many bad teams that were ordained for failure very early in the season. The Rams showed a glimmer of hope against two tough NFC East opponents, but those back-to-back wins were bracketed by a 0-4 start and a 0-10 finish. Jim Haslett’s reaction to the way his team played said enough. The Chiefs were apparently tanking three games into the season, which has to be some kind of record. The Bengals, prior to their bizarre three-game surge to end the season, were similarly hopeless. The Lions, at a record-setting 0-16, are the best example. Unlike in many past years, when a bottom-feeder had a reasonable chance of nipping at the heels of a contender, this simply didn’t occur this season.
The worst team in the NFL is usually around 2-14, with a 1-15 team surfacing every few seasons. This season, there was a 0-16 team and two 2-14 teams. Had the Lions done their duty as the league’s worst team and won a couple, and had the Rams and Chiefs shown up for a third win apiece, that would be four more wins – enough to make the AFC’s three 11-5 teams all 10-6 and to knock another win off of one of them in order to make a 9-7 elimination. While the schedule didn’t occur in such a way as to allow this, consider the following:
The Detroit Lions were 0-9 against teams that finished 9-7 or better, and 0-3 against 8-8 teams.
The St. Louis Rams were 2-9 against teams that finished 9-7 or better.
The Kansas City Chiefs were 0-7 against teams that finished 9-7 or better, and 1-3 against 8-8 teams.
The Cincinnati Bengals were 1-9-1 against teams that finished 9-7 or better, and 0-1 against 8-8 teams.
Playoff-bound teams and impersonators alike were able to pad their records at an astounding rate this season, with at least two teams in each conference being a nearly guaranteed win. The only team of the four to finish with something approaching a normal record, the Bengals at 4-11-1, needed a schedule ending with the Browns and then who else but the Chiefs? All of the above records, when combined, show that over-.500 teams got to split a 3-34-1 pie, and .500 teams received a 7-1 treat of their own.
The list of teams benefiting from these throwaway games is long. The Vikings and Bears each got to play the Lions twice; the Steelers and Ravens each got to play the Bengals twice; the Cardinals got to play the Rams twice (and finished the season 3-7 outside of their pathetic division); the Titans got to play the Lions and the Bengals; the Patriots got to play the Chiefs and the Rams; and there are more. All of the better teams went 2-0 in these matchups.
Had there been a challenge, many of the series could have been split. There’s no guarantee of it, but there would at least be a chance. In comparison to their current records, does a 9-7 Vikings team or an 8-8 Bears team look particularly fierce? How about 11-5 Steelers and 10-6 Ravens? 10-6 Patriots suddenly aren’t such a fan darling, as the Dolphins missed the playoffs with that record a few years ago.
Ironically, had Denver beaten Kansas City in Arrowhead Stadium early this season, we’d be seeing the Broncos in the playoffs. Had Dallas beaten St. Louis, they’d be a wildcard. Same goes for if the Redskins had beaten the Rams and Bengals. Every year, there’s a spoiler. This year, the spoiling tended to happen less often, and many games were virtual locks both straight-up and against the spread. Thanksgiving’s Titans/Lions game, quite possibly the ugliest affair ever to receive such widespread media attention since the infamous San Francisco/Denver Superbowl in the ‘80s, was the crowning moment of this trend.
It’s not that the league is tougher now. If anything, it’s tougher when there are plenty of 9-7 teams in the playoffs, because the bottoms of those teams’ divisions don’t read 2-14. They read 8-8 or 7-9. Even teams in tough divisions often had outlet games against ultra-weak opponents. In a league with parity, any team can win any game. In a league with disparity, prognosticators can look psychic. Teams can do this even better; none of the Lions, Rams, Chiefs or Bengals looked like it even occurred to them that they could win a lot of those games. In-season personnel changes, untested combinations of players and 2009 draft buzz all left this year’s black sheep ready and willing to be sheared.
When looking at the gaudy records of this year’s top eight AFC teams, or of the NFC’s after about week 14, it is crucial to consider the team’s schedule and the quality of competition faced by that team’s rivals. Since there were at least four astronomically terrible teams and no 14-2 or better juggernaut to mop up the benefits, the wins were more evenly distributed in a way that pumped up the records of the lower playoff seeds and the teams that just missed. It’s a mere statistical distortion, and its uncommonness is what makes some pretty ordinary teams look pretty special. Getting to 11-5 in this season’s AFC is arguably no more difficult than getting to 9-7 in some of the brutal NFC showdowns during the 1990s. It’s no more of a hotly contested league this season. It’s just disparate. |
