Paltry Parity part 2

Radical proposals to level the playing field

In Part 1 I showed some fairly definitive evidence for the claim that the NFL is not a league of perfect parity. I’m not sure this finding is surprising to anyone — I don’t actually know of anyone who is running around forwarding the argument that perfect parity exists, or even can exist, in the NFL.

Still, the distance the current iteration of the game is from a truly level playing field was interesting to quantify. We should have 7 more NFL franchises with at least one Super Bowl Championship, on average. That’s 35 percent more than the 20 we have today, prior to Super Bowl 59¹ kickoff, and 35 percent more than we will have after the game has concluded.

The salary cap has had, at best, a small effect on parity, though in the proper direction. I estimate that the cap has provided about a third of a new Champion over expected more than a regime without a cap.

The question is: is there anything that can be done to increase parity and continue to level the playing field?

I have a couple ideas. I’ll leave aside in-season rules like protecting the Quarterback from late hits and just focus on ways to change the structure of the league between seasons.

There are two ideas at play: The first is that coming into the season, as many teams as possible should have a probability of 1/n — where n is the number of teams in the league — of winning a Super Bowl. In a 32 team league, this would mean most teams would have a little over a 3 percent chance to win a championship at the start of the season.

As a point of reference, coming into 2024 I gave the Chiefs a 15.5 percent chance of winning the Super Bowl and the Eagles a 6.2 percent chance. This top heavy probability distribution left 20 teams below the parity Mendoza line. This top heavy distribution is what we’re trying to reshape.

Second is that even if there is a lopsided distribution in a given season, we want teams to be as “upwardly mobile” as possible between seasons.

Here’s how I would do it. (These ideas are sure to be wildly unpopular.)

1. No second contracts for Quarterbacks by the drafting team

If parity is the goal, there’s no getting around the fact that what needs doing is wealth redistribution. We’re going to have to take from the haves and give to the have-nots.

Redistribution is not something foreign to the NFL. The league shares revenue among all the franchises equally despite Dallas being the league’s biggest draw. The rookie draft is set up in such a way that the have-nots are rewarded with the highest picks and the haves are punished, in relative terms.

The core problem the NFL faces is that most of the time you can’t win a Super Bowl without an elite quarterback. And drafting a good Quarterback, even in the first round, is ultimately a coin flip.

When it’s obvious a QB is elite, they usually get locked up into long-term contracts until well past their prime. It’s rare for an elite quarterback to become a free agent.

Tom Brady is a recent exception, and he immediately took Tampa Bay to the Super Bowl and led them to victory. But that exception also proves the point: if we want to give more teams a real opportunity to compete, we need to make more elite quarterbacks available.

Forcing all drafted rookie QBs to sign their second contracts with a team that did not draft them would help create that supply of elite QBs. Spreading QB talent around the league is the quickest, most direct way to create upward mobility in the NFL.

This does suck for the team that won the QB lottery, but consider: The drafting team would still get 5 years (assuming the QB was a first round pick) of cheap QB play, which is the biggest benefit of winning the elite QB draft lottery.

Further, the benefit the team realized from the elite QB wasn’t earned, not really. They lost, so they got a high draft pick. Then they got lucky and their QB pick turned out to be great. No one knows anything about drafting quarterbacks. There’s little to no skill involved here. It’s luck.

The drafting team could apply a franchise tag to keep their QB around another year, but two or three consecutive tags would probably not be allowed.² And if a Quarterback rode the bench for most of his rookie contract, the drafting team would not lose him automatically. They would have a chance to re-sign him.

Finally, there is hidden benefit to this rule for the teams who lose their QB. QBs who perform just north of average over the course of their rookie contract often end up signing second contracts with the team that drafted them. These are almost always bad contracts for the team. The mix of incentives that lead to these bad second contracts include: GMs who want to validate their past picks; a fear of getting worse; a lack of fear of long-term mediocrity; and a cultural need to reward home grown talent.

Ultimately these incentives cause a team to overpay for limited upside and slightly better than average production. Instead of churning their roster to try and find a team capable of winning a Super Bowl, franchise front offices maintain a roster that they hope won’t get the Head Coach and GM fired. Being forced to move on from decent but not great draft picks at QB will help many teams avoid this stagnation.

2. Modify the salary cap for defensive players

This idea is more speculative than the forced moving of QBs through the league. It also somewhat flies in the face of my own research. But the benefit of the cap on parity was small, and the physics of the NFL have changed to such a degree that I think modifying the cap for defensive players could have benefits for parity.

If we accept that QBs make the league go ‘round we need to both make them more available in the market, and also make countering them an accessible strategy. To accomplish the latter, one approach is to allow teams with cheap QBs to load up even more on defense in an attempt to compete.

We know, for instance, that a team that has great players at nearly every position on defense, and that also has quality depth, can win a Super Bowl. The Bears in Super Bowl XX and the Ravens in Super Bowl XXXV are examples.

The problem is that it’s not possible to build these super defensive teams under the current system, even if you skimp at Quarterback. Since defense is a weak link system, the success of the strategy relies more on the quality of your worst rotational starter than on the quality of your best starter. You need stars across the starting defense make this work, and then you need to stuff the bench with quality backups to weather the storm of injuries.

A modified salary cap that allows teams to go over the cap by a margin proportional to their lack of spending at the quarterback position could accomplish this goal.

An example: Team A spends 5% of their cap on a QB, while the average of the top 5 paid QBs is 15% of the cap. Team A would be allowed to spend 10% (15%-5%) over the cap on defensive players in the upcoming season.

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If you couple the rule forcing elite QBs onto the market while they are still in their prime with the rule allowing teams that spend down at QB to load up on defense, you could create a league with more year-to-year parity.

More fan bases would get to experience the thrill of hanging a championship banner, and dominant teams would mostly become transient, two to three year affairs that could be effectively countered by competently run front offices who create defensive teams purpose built to stop them.

1. Not sure why I wrote 60. Corrected.

2. I can imagine changing the structure of second and third tags on the same player to keep the option available but make it extremely unappetizing from a cost standpoint. The point, though, is that these players need to be forced to move on to a new team.