The myth of NFL parity

[Non-Issue]

11 hours ago, squire12 said:

So using the definition of parity being a rough distribution of talent across the league, yet using playoff appearances as the measure of that supposed parity (or lack thereof).  How is that even close to measuring something close to the same thing?

Well, now that the discussion is over, I guess I can go ahead and say I am not a fan of his definition at all. 

I might try to look a bit deeper at the numbers from the old days in comparison to the "parity era." See if his date ranges had anything to do with his conclusion. Wouldnt be the first person to cherry pick stats around here.

[squire12]

47 minutes ago, Non-Issue said:

Well, now that the discussion is over, I guess I can go ahead and say I am not a fan of his definition at all. 

I might try to look a bit deeper at the numbers from the old days in comparison to the "parity era." See if his date ranges had anything to do with his conclusion. Wouldnt be the first person to cherry pick stats around here.

I have never heard of the proposed definition of parity being the even distribution of talent.  

That fully relies on the competence of teams/GM's in drafting well, signing appropriate FA and re-signing the right FA.  

The NFL does all it can to allow teams with less talent to acquire better talent via the draft.  The salary cap allows teams with less talent (and likely less salary committed to those players ) the ability to sign other teams FA to boost their talent.  

As I mentioned earlier, I think a better definition would be to look at the number of teams whose record/winning % fall within a certain range of .500.

[Malik]

This thread is...a lot. The idea that because a team made the playoffs once or twice in almost 20 years that there's parity is a bad argument though. I don't think anyone would an argument outside of the confines of defending the NFL's parity. I think the reasonable definition in the confines of sports for parity would be the ability for teams to be consistently successful over a period of time rather than simply making the playoffs once or twice across 20 years.

 

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As I mentioned earlier, I think a better definition would be to look at the number of teams whose record/winning % fall within a certain range of .500.

I definitely agree with this. Even though I don't think it should be a hard .500 across the line because simply going 7-9 yields .438 and in baseball that's like 71-91. An MLB team winning 70% of their games would be one of the greatest ones of all time while we 12-4 seasons or better in pretty much every 16 game season. 

[43M]

NFL doesnt have parity insomuch as there are different teams winning year to year, but moreso that every team is on a level playing field....which isnt the case in other sports.

In other sports, numerous teams are at an extreme advantage or disadvantage  because of the market they are in.

In football, the main thing that holds teams back is the inability to build a winning team, but its not because they arent able to afford the best players.   Its because some owners just know how to run their teams successfully, and some dont. 

[sp6488]

5 hours ago, Malik said:

This thread is...a lot. The idea that because a team made the playoffs once or twice in almost 20 years that there's parity is a bad argument though. I don't think anyone would an argument outside of the confines of defending the NFL's parity. I think the reasonable definition in the confines of sports for parity would be the ability for teams to be consistently successful over a period of time rather than simply making the playoffs once or twice across 20 years.

 

I definitely agree with this. Even though I don't think it should be a hard .500 across the line because simply going 7-9 yields .438 and in baseball that's like 71-91. An MLB team winning 70% of their games would be one of the greatest ones of all time while we 12-4 seasons or better in pretty much every 16 game season. 

I think the necessary caveat being that there needs to be alternation to some level as consistent success by a static group would be non-parity.  Perhaps that was what you were getting at, but I thought that it was a necessary caveat.

I would think a possible way to measure it would be to determine (1) how often each team ended up in the top 1/3 of the leagues w/r/t record (to control for different league sizes and playoff systems) and (2) look at what the average churn within this group was on a yearly basis.

I would think that a league with "greater" parity would likely (1) have a distribution closer to equal for times in the top 1/3 of the league and (2) have a higher average annual churn.

[jebrick]

On 3/23/2018 at 2:53 PM, sp6488 said:

I would think that a league with "greater" parity would likely (1) have a distribution closer to equal for times in the top 1/3 of the league and (2) have a higher average annual churn.

How do you calculate an idiot GM/owner? 

I would look at what the team does to bring all teams to an equal footing in regards to talent.

[sp6488]

2 hours ago, jebrick said:

How do you calculate an idiot GM/owner? 

I would look at what the team does to bring all teams to an equal footing in regards to talent.

For your first question, I think we would have to consider whether we are comfortable working with the assumption that the idiot GM/owner is evenly distributed among the pro sports, which I think is a fair assumption to make for the purposes of this test.

For your second statement., that's a way to look at it, which could certainly supplement what I suggested.  It's just more process-based, rather than results-based.  I don't know which is the more "correct" way to go about it, I think it would depend on how we chose to define "parity."

[biletnikoff]

lol of course theres no real parity. Major market teams and preferred teams for what ever reason are constantly in the playoffs.

people say Dallas sucks yet they still take up a playoff spot every couple years.

theres the top 10..and then the other 22 who get an occasional playoff scrap, only to be eliminated anyway.

take it a step further.. original AFL teams have a horrible  super Bowl record aside from the Pats,Raiders Broncos. Everyon else thats original AFL either doesnt get there or loses anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[biletnikoff]

real parity will never exist as long as there is tv money to be made.

[jebrick]

10 hours ago, biletnikoff said:

real parity will never exist in professional sports

Fixed that for you

[biletnikoff]

9 hours ago, jebrick said:

Fixed that for you

Same difference, as the saying goes

[Iamcanadian]

On 3/21/2018 at 5:48 AM, Superman(DH23) said:

 

3) playoff turnover.  The NFL turns over at least 5-8 playoff teams each year.  That means at least half of the teams in the playoffs every year are new teams from the previous year.  

Correct, but this is done by design not by parity. The NFL manipulates schedules to create this turnover and it is rare that 8 teams are new, 5/6 is the more accurate figure!4) Equality of opportunity.  The rules in football are designed to create a competitve environment and make bad teams good and good teams bad.  If you sign the best fas you dont get comp.picks.  You win you get moved down the draft board.  Every team required to spend the floor and every team required to spend less than the cap.  There are no teams in the NFL with 1/10th of the payroll of the top spending team. And glorious revenue sharing.  Do the Bills make exactly the same revenue as the cowboys?  No, but the discrepancy is insignificant thanks to revenue sharing.  The money in sports currently comes from tv deals.  Tv is 100% shared in the NFL.  Nobody has their own cable channel. Games are televised both locally and nationally (with virtually no blackouts) and every team gets the same piece of the pie.  This is the massive distinction between mlb and the nfl.  That revenue sharing means that my payroll comes entirely from tv and ad money and i dont have to worry about how im going to pay my costs.  On top of all that non gtd contracts play a large roll as well.

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This is totally incorrect, small market teams are at a huge disadvantage in revenue creation, if you are a small market team, you had better have a solid owner and a solid FO who drafts well and hires a good HC or you will not be able to compete.  There is a reason why small market teams rarely sign expensive FA's and have a serious problem retaining their own FA's. Comparing the Bills and the Cowboys clearly shows that there is a significant difference in what each team earns. Ever since FA came into being, Buffalo has not had a competitive team till last year, their previous owner simply lacked the financial resources to compete and practically never signed an expensive FA and had great difficulty keeping his own FA's.

There is a reason why the new CBA has a minimum amount of dollars that must be spent in salaries, because a lot of small market teams never spent close to their cap.

Yes, TV revenue and merchandise revenue are shared, but big city teams charge a lot more for their tickets, food and drink, often have bigger stadiums and this creates a significant difference in revenues. 

This difference in revenue shows up in their ability to sign the top FO personnel and the top scouts and a lot more scouts than small market teams can afford.

Then there is the difference in how wealthy your owner is and how much of his wealth, he is prepared to spend on his team.

On paper it looks like revenue sharing  creates equal revenue for each team, but that is as far from the truth and is just a myth the NFL created to keep small market fans buying tickets and merchandise.

I repeat, the NFL is very clever, it uses non guaranteed contract money to create the impression that NFL player make a lot of money, when in fact, for the most part, only QB's come close to what NBA stars and MLB stars make. It is an illusion just like revenue sharing creates the impression that all teams have similar revenue, just another myth.

By manipulating schedules, the NFL practically guarantees that the wild card teams rarely repeat and you throw in one or 2 Division winners who through injuries or tough competition, they also do not repeat and you make it look like parity exists but in reality, it is just another illusion. 

 

 

 

[candyman93]

I just laugh when people claim the NBA has less parity. They clearly haven’t been paying attention to the AFC the last 2 decades. It’s been the Big Ben, Brady, and Manning conference.

[TheKillerNacho]

Who cares? The NFL has just enough parity for me.

[Brit Pack]

Apologies for giving this topic a bump but I came across this last night and felt impelled to comment.

I am born and bred in the UK and as a teenager in the 90’s became a massive NFL fan. While being British I naturally also had an affection towards, how do you guys call it? Soccer. As the years have passed my love for soccer has diminished for the sole reason there is no parity in the league. Teams with the most money dominate. Those teams can afford to make poor player purchase decisions as there is no salary cap ramifications. Subsequently there is no juggling of keeping wages under a salary cap so no one team retains all the top talent.

For me parity is all about the fact that creating dynasties becomes very hard and that the system is not set up for one or two teams to monopolise the talent. You look at Spanish football beside Real Madrid and Barcelona, no other team has typically had a look in. In fact, if you look across European football each league has a couple of clubs that dominate. In the Premiership, since it was created in ’92, in 26 years a total of 6 clubs have won the league! Two of those clubs only won it once and were really aberrations. In the last 10 years Manchester United has won it 5 times (and they are going through a bad patch at the moment),  Chelsea 3 times and probably won't win it again for a while as their rich oligarch Russian owner is bored in spending money on the club as he once did, Manchester City have won it twice, and will win it by a heft margin this season and going forward will dominate as they spend ridiculous sums, and Leicester City won it once, which was a total outlier.

To address further points by the OP, to me as an non-American, having all your major sports (I don’t follow any other American sport but the NFL, so have zero knowledge on them) implement some form of salary cap or structure towards parity is amazing. The initial statement that caused the uproar in my mind that ‘NFL parity is a myth’ is a ridiculous statement and then to adjust that to it has less parity than say the MLB is to me like saying Scarlett Johansson is prettier than Jessica Biel. Especially when in the UK for soccer we are married to Roseanna Barr, so to speak.  

The next issue which I have which has already been stated is that the definition of parity. Never in my life have I heard that parity means that talent across the teams is the same. To say that would also imply talent evaluation, coaching and organisational structure are also considered equal. Parity is all about how the rules of the ‘game’ are set up so each has the opportunity to win. Whether that is set up better between the NFL or MLB, I got no clue, but if that is your case again your splitting hairs really in the broader context of professional team sports and to lambast and criticise the NFL and say we are dupes in believing in parity is in my mind ridiculous.

Finally, as again brought up if you do equate parity meaning the equal quality of players across teams, why is playoff appearances a measure of that. Seems very arbitrary to me.

Anyway, to reiterate the NFL has amazing structures in place to allow teams to compete, that is why it has grown in popularity here in the UK. Where here the reality is if your soccer club is not owned by a rich Arab oil baron you have nothing to look forward to in a season, except maybe not get relegated.