The Quarter Pole

So here we are, four games into the pro football season. Football season is like a horse race, and the 32 teams are mostly one-fourth of the way through (a few teams have had a bye week, but most have played four games already) the long, 16 game season. We’ll call where they are at now “the quarter pole.” Let’s look at take a look at where this season has taken us so far.

The Bengals and the Arizona Cardinals are both 4 + 0. Have we ever been only four games into a season and had only two unbeaten teams left? The 1972 Miami Dolphins are smiling already. They are both solid defensively, pretty good offensively, teams with very few holes. Neither team has a whole lot of sizzle. Maybe they’ll be around late in the playoffs, maybe they’ll be washouts and fold down the stretch. It’s too early to tell right now.

It’s not too early to tell who the nags are. The Jacksonville Jags and the Oakland Raiduhs are both 0 + 4 and pretty much out of the playoffs. The Raiduhs have stunk so bad, they’ve already fired their coach. Both teams will probably be serious contenders for the first draft choice next season.

There are a whole slew of one win teams who are perilously close to becoming irrelevant in this year’s race. They have their one win, but they don’t look like they’re going to get (8 or 9 MORE wins from these guys?) a whole lot more. That’d be the Titans, the Browns, Tampa Bay, The RED Skins, maybe the Jets, and a special mention to the St. Louis Rams, who gambled their whole season on the health of a quarterback who always gets hurt, and… AMAZINGLY, he got hurt. So, in a league where the MOST important player on the field is the quarterback, they are playing out the season with career backup quarterbacks so ordinary, they’d probably have a tough job being starters in the Canadian Football League. The Jets are a maybe because they know how to play good defense and also have a knack for winning ugly. The Saints have one win, but they have Drew Brees and that look of a team that still has enough gas in the tank to win enough to get into the playoffs.

The real news in the NFL this year is the parity. There are thirteen 2 + 2 teams. Some, like the Colts, Packers, Falcons, 49ers, maybe the NY Giants and the NE Pats, seem to have strong playoff feel about them as they’ve demonstrated enough good characteristics to think of themselves as still being “in the race.” The other 2 + 2 teams, the Dolphins, the Bills, the Chiefs, the Steelers, the Vikings, the Bears and the Panthers seem to have that “disease” known as the .500 syndrome, meaning they look good enough to win half their games and bad enough to lose the other half. All of these teams could still be in it, or could still be .500 teams or worse. Such is what happens in an NFL season.

The teams that still look like the real deal are the two 2 – 1 teams, defending Super Bowl combatants The Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Donks, who have both beaten some good teams and their only losses were games where they were competitive to the end before just barely losing. Good losses.

Other teams that look like the real deal are the 3 + 1 teams including the San Diego Chargers (ball controlling wizards and led by a title worthy QB Phillip Rivers), the Baltimore Ravens (enough offense to go with their good defense?), the Detroit Lions (finally some defense to go with their offense), and very surprisingly, the How Bout Them Cowboys, who really do have a good offense this year, that at times, looks unstoppable. Their “big three” on offense, QB Tony Romo, WR Dez Bryant, and RB DeMarco Murray are strikingly similar to the similar excellent Cowboy trio of the 90’s, QB Troy Aikman, WR Michael Irvin and RB Emmitt Smith. If you are not seeing that Jerry Jones is trying to recreate that same type of team now, you are missing the signals. I don’t think this Cowboy team goes 8 + 8 this year.

The other 3 + 1 teams the Houston Texans and the Philadelphia Eagles both seem to have potential holes in their teams’ chances. The Texans seem to have a really good defense again, but not enough offense (one-dimensional teams that want to “just run the ball” all the time with a weak passing attack always seem to get stopped by the good teams). The Eagles have their funky fast break offense, but I think the 49ers showed the blueprint on how to stop the Eagles’ Oregon Duck type of offense. It is the same thing Stanford always does to slow down Oregon and Jim Harbaugh (former Stanford coach) of the Niners knew how to stop them. Others will utilize the same defense to stop them. I think the Texans and the Eagles will be good, but not great.

The bottom line is that all these teams are only at the quarter pole right now. More wins and losses will give this race more definition. For now, there are a lot of teams within a game of the playoffs and everyone is still mathematically
within reach. Sometimes teams that look lousy now figure things out and go on winning streaks and earn their way into the playoff picture. And other teams that are true losers will continue to find out ways to lose. In other words, the only thing we really know right now is that the Raiduhs and the Jaguars will probably continue to lose and will NOT make the playoffs. The only question is, “which fans will put the bags on their heads first?”