The Strange Case of the 2008 NFL Season

The NFL Playoffs entered week two pitting the final eight survivors of the NFL regular season, which ended December 28, 2008. 2008 was a strange year for pro football, and two developments stand out for me. There was way too much really bad professional football week in and week out, and the NFL officially tuned out the West Coast fans and cities. If you don’t think the national media has turned off everything football in the Pacific and Mountain time-zones here is what Peter King wrote this week in Sports Illustrated about the first NFL Playoff weekend:

-Over the weekend, only Arizona-Atlanta was a relative snoozer. We had one game go to overtime, another close game get broken up by Ed Reed's acrobatic brilliance, and Brian Westbrook break up a two-point fourth-quarter game by being, well, Brian Westbrook.-

I’m sorry, Peter, but with all your travels up and down the eastern seaboard you could not have watched the same games our western feed delivered to our living rooms and bars. Both of the games on Sunday were brutally predictable and had no drama in the fourth quarters. The Falcons-Cardinals game on Saturday was pure drama, which came down to the final drive with Arizona crossing up conventional wisdom by throwing for first downs instead of running into the line for the obligatory three and out. The final score was 30-24. That was pressure, not watching Chad Pennington throw one more interception with a game long since lost. The scores of Sunday’s games were 27-9 Ravens over the Dolphins, and 26-14 Eagles beating the Vikings. Do those scores sound anywhere as close as 23-17 in overtime, and 30-24, with both games decided on final drives?

I guess when only one team not found in the Central or Eastern time-zones has a winning record for the season it makes for the big snooze on the coverage for the entire region.

Here is a funny note on the season, the Cleveland Browns, perennial losers since coming back ten years ago as an expansion team, were showcased 5 times on prime-time NFL broadcasts (Monday Night, Sunday Night, Thursday Night and Thanksgiving) this year. Only the Dallas Cowboys with six appearances on these prime-time telecasts were shown more often nationally than the hapless Browns of 2008. Two playoff teams, Atlanta and Miami, did not get on one of these prime-time broadcasts all regular season, but the winless Lions did on Thanksgiving Day. The Falcons and Dolphins joined the state of Missouri (with bad teams bracketed in the Western Divisions of the AFC & NFC) in being excluded from view this year from the national population.

Of teams playing half their schedule on Pacific time, only the San Diego Chargers made it into the top third of teams playing prime-time football this past season with four games shown. Of the 12 franchises that played at least four games on the big media schedule, the Chargers join only the New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers as clubs that still have a shot to win this year’s Super Bowl. The Broncos, Packers, Bears, Cowboys, Browns, Patriots and Redskins all with four or five nationally shown games did not even get to the playoffs this season. Four of those teams did not even have winning records. The Colts joined this elite most-shown group of clubs and made the playoffs, but lost in the wild card match-up weekend to the Chargers.

Speaking of San Diego, the last California city to host a Super Bowl, this year’s scheduled NFL Main Event in Tampa Bay will mark the longest continuous time that this game has not been played in California. The first Super Bowl was played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum back in 1967. The longest stretch of Super Bowls played outside the Golden State before returning to California was the five games between 1968 and 1972 with the 1973 game back in Los Angeles and played at the Coliseum. In Super Bowl history California hosted one game of three played in the 1960s, two games in the 1970s, five games in the 1980s, two games in the 1990s and one game in 2003 this decade. There is no future Super Bowl scheduled for California at this time. Florida will have the next two and Texas is scheduled to have the 2011 game.

2008 was also the year that the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were finally displaced as the worst team in NFL history by this year’s Detroit Lions. The Lions gave up 517 points on the way to their 0-16 record. Only the 1981 Baltimore Colts gave up more points (533) in the 30 years that the NFL has been playing a 16 game regular season. As bad as that Colts team was, the guys on it still won two games during that 1981 season.

The dreadful 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers had a built in excuse for their infamy. They were an expansion team that year, and got the very worst players from the rest of the league to start their franchise. The Seattle Seahawks also began playing as a team in 1976. The Seahawks were bad, but at least they won two games in their first year of existence. The 2008 Lions have no excuses, just ill fitting coaches and players working for the worst management in football.

2008 saw the word parity temporarily vanished from the NFL lexicon. Parity has meant that on any given Sunday the bottom dwellers could rise from the ashes of their ineptitude and grind out a win over a title challenger opponent. The distance from the bottom of the standings to the upper echelon teams is ever so slight when parity rules. Only a modest adjustment, a player or two, or a coaching change is needed to propel a team in the outhouse to the penthouse. This year there were simply too many teams that had no chance all year long. Just ask fans in St. Louis, Cleveland, Oakland, Detroit, Kansas City and Cincinnati if competitive football was happening with teams in their zip codes.

The NFL provides a wealth of statistical information on players and teams in the league. Fantasy Football can take a bow. One of the interesting stats to help determine a team’s relative strength or weakness is the difference between points scored and points allowed for the games played in a season. This point differential tells at a glance how great, putrid or mediocre a team is for any given season. Historically, very few dominant teams have posted better than 200 plus point differential.

In the past ten years two franchises have gone a regular season with better than a 200 point positive differential: the 2007 New England Patriots and the 1999 and 2001 St. Louis Rams. The Patriots demolished the differential spread by going 16-0 in 2007 and beating their opponents by a record 315 point difference. This is a team that averaged a 20 point margin of victory over their opponents for the whole season. And they didn’t win the Super Bowl. Neither did the Rams of 2001 who bettered their opponents by 230 points for the full season or by an average of two touchdowns every week. The 1999 Rams with a spread of 284 points over their opposition did win the Super Bowl with a saving tackle at the one yard line as time expired. The Minnesota Vikings of 1998, who went 15-1 with a point differential of 260 over the teams they played, did not even make it to the Super Bowl held in 1999. You can’t count on the best in the fall to deliver the goods in winter.

On the flip side of that point differential are the really putrid teams in a given season that get beat over the length of a season by more than 200 points. This doesn’t happen very frequently either. Just like the very few dominant teams, the NFL gets a stinker club or two in season once every three years. This just completed 2008 NFL campaign had two teams that were so bad (Lions and Rams) each cumulatively lost by more 200 points. In the thirty years that a 16 game schedule has been in place this has happened just four times (2008, 2000, 1990 and 1984). There has never been two dominant 200 point plus teams in a single season.

I’m rooting for magic this month where the Arizona Cardinals wind up meeting the winner of the Steelers-Ravens. Quothe Ed Hochuli nevermore? It’s been that kind of year.

Good Luck football fans, everywhere!