Reprinted from Sept. 5th at Rick's suggestion. All comments past #16 are comments that follow the 49er detonation. - Jeff
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Dr. D was taken aback, on that read-option play which resulted in a bizarrely-open Ricardo Lockette. As Lockette raced down the sideline for paydirt, Wilson during live action ! turned back toward the bench and gleefully shouted out the coach who set up the play.
Imagine how the coach felt. ... Pete Carroll was asked about Wilson's cheesy rah-rah antics, and Carroll shot back "We all know it's from the heart."
And: when Wilson does it during live action, there is a sincerity associated, don't you think?
And: that's a little different from bicep-kissing.
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Dr. D isn't above visiting the 49ers' blogs to chuckle over their attempt to dismiss the way the Seahawks crushed Green Bay like a pop can. "Well, what we learned is that Green Bay is terrible."
What Dr. D learned, is that Aaron Rodgers couldn't do much better than Peyton Manning and Drew Brees. That is 3 HOF quarterbacks in 4 games, burned in effigy and hung from the rafters. Yes, they all had game film to study. At what point do you concede the obvious?
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Particularly, the 49ers fans saw Wilson's performance as "meh." To me, that is genuinely a garbage swing at the pitch, a complete failure to see the point. NFL quarterbacking, in the 21st century, is quick reads and seeing the seams in the defense.
It is not about dropping back, planting the back foot like a cannon strut, and howitzer'ing the ball downfield. NFL quarterbacking is now about quickness. Not speed: quickness.
It seems to me, as a casual NFL fan, that Russell Wilson has been doing 1-2-3 defense reads his whole life, and that he works extremely hard at it. In year three, it appears to be jelling for him. Steve Young has made the assertion that Colin Kaepernick never moved past his first simple read, and now it's catching up to him...
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Moving the little metaphor over to baseball, Bill James made an observation from his strongest suit, that being baseball history. Almanac stuff, templates, pattern recognition. This is Dr. D's favorite aspect of sabermetrics also. As they say in chess, "Whatever position you've got, it has been played before!"
He said that players like Wally Joyner are extremely common in baseball. This is the player who comes up, lands with a splash, and then goes into a glide ratio down into mediocrity. He gave you his best, right at the start, and you assumed he would gather momentum. Not always, and maybe not even usually.
"David Cassidy," quipped James. (If you just joined us, at like age 17 Cassidy wrote a couple of neat pop jingles for The Partridge Family, became a shooting star, but the world passed him by two years later, and he had nothing else in the tank.)
You think that Colin Kaeperncik has a little David Cassidy in him? :- )
I'll guarantee you that Russell Wilson doesn't have a David Cassidy bone in his body. And the Seahawks-49ers Wars of the '10s are already looking like they could become less than advertised.
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Here is a question for you guys who know the NFL a lot better than I do. ... I flat out would not want a childish punk like Colin Kaepernick running my franchise. Has there ever been a punk who led a great NFL dynasty? Do you still have to have a mature, responsible man at quarterback, or in the 21st century is that obsolete?
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Richard Sherman
His detractors, in their sour grapes, claim that you "neutralize" Sherman by lining up your weakest receiver on the right side, and then just play on the left side of the field. Did you notice? Aaron Rodgers never LOOKED right during the game.
Two more questions for my NFL mentors.
1. Is there any way these fans could be serious? Or is that STRICTLY, ENTIRELY sour grapes? Playing 10-on-10 in a phone booth is the "neutralization" of one defender?
2. Aren't QB's still supposed to "look off" the safety and all that? How come Thomas and Chancellor aren't exploiting that "left side only" playbook more than they did? Or was that just Aaron Rodgers' incredible greatness, that he could use 60% of the field and still go 23-for-33 dinks?
Not that I'm complaining. Green Bay had as much chance of a deep ball, or a broken run, as Dr. D has of running an ML ballclub.
Your friend,
Dr D
++ "They just got after us. That's the best way I can say it, they just got after us," Daniels said. "You could see it in their eyes, they just got after us."
"I think that you get wake up calls and then you get drill sergeant kick-you-out-the-bed calls, and I think we just got kicked out the bed onto a cement floor, and it hurt." ++
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My vote for the best Seahawks read today: This one at Grantland. A big smile every other paragraph.
The snarking by every other NFL fanbase about Russell Wilson and constantly calling him a "game manager" and "not elite" as pejoratives...is mostly a lot of sour grapes and envy IMO. Along with some perfectly legitimate skepticism about ANY new, unexpected (and unusual) star player - that they may end up a flash in the pan.
It's funny though, the bottom line is...we already won a Super Bowl in the guy's 2nd season. I mean, whether he is "elite" or whatever subjective word you want to endlessly debate...there's not any possible way to do "better"...than what he actually did! Ok, if young Aaron Rodgers was the Seahawks QB maybe they'd have won 63-8. Cool. I think we'll be fine with our 35 point SB wins the next few years :)
Sherman - I am not knowledgeable enough, but I'm sure there is a great debate to be had about whether you'd rather have a corner who eliminates the other team's best WR wherever they are, or one who eliminates 1/3 of the field every time. In reality the answer is - take either one and start counting your rings. But my impression is that this argument about "neutralizing" Sherman by sticking your bad receiver on that side of the field...is laughable, and backwards. It'd be kind of like saying an NBA team "neutralized" a great shot blocker by...never driving to the basket, and only shooting three pointers. Great, problem solved.
Sherman says his biggest challenge right now is staying focused and not getting bored, since nobody throws at him anymore. (Except genius Kaepernick hahaha.)
The Grantland writers (and Bill Simmons) are some of the few in the national punditry who view the Seahawks realistically. They never spout the foolish nonsense that most pundits (even otherwise smart ones such as Peter King) do like, "nobody repeats as Super Bowl champion EVER so the Seahawks won't"...yeah, ever since 10 years ago. And many other times before that. Like 2004 was the 19th century or something. Reminds me of the naysayers when Phil Jackson signed on with the Knicks - "the game has passed him by"...when he won back to back championships THREE FREAKIN YEARS AGO!
I don't know if you read this series by Hawkblogger comparing the Hawks to past SB champs...if not it's a must read. It is downright eerie how similar they are to the 80's Niners and 90's Cowboys...and the real jaw dropper is the comparison of the Hawks season stats to the 48-year average SB winner statline. It is like they just rolled off a NFL champion factory line or something.
http://www.hawkblogger.com/2014/07/the-path-back-to-top-1980s-san.htmlht......
is all the pundits who say Russell Wilson has to "learn" to be a pocket passer to be successful going forward. Have they not watched a single minute of his college tape? He ran the West Coast offense for three years at NC State - the most "hit your back foot and throw in rhythm" offense there is. Then he went to Wisconsin and ran the Power-I for a year, using the play-action drop-back passing game; another plant your foot in the ground, read the defense, make a good decision and throw it accurately offensive system. Did they not notice that for his first two years in Seattle it wasn't a matter of him not knowing what to do or how to be a drop-back passer, it's that he was running for his life most of the time? I swear to whatever deity you want the vast majority of those folks still look at total passing yards as the ultimate barometer. They don't want wins, they want style points. Style points don't win championships. Russell will do whatever it takes to win regardless of what his personal statistics may be. I have no doubt that if his job was to throw the ball 40 times a game he'd do that just fine.
Here is the secret of Seattle's use of Sherman and the pass rush. Sherman creates the pass rush. Right handed QBs throw more naturally to their right AND see and sense the pass rush from the right more easily. That why the big money gets spent on the LEFT tackle, protect that blindside. By eliminating the right side of the field with Sherman and the deep center with Thomas, Seattle is forcing right handed QBs to turn and focus on the left third. This make them throw across their body AND NOW MAKES THE RIGHT SIDE THE BLIND SIDE. Seattle is creating a mismatch by crashing Avril and Bennett into the inferior right tackle and guard while the QB can't see it coming.
... and I sincerely don't get why this is an argument.
With Sherman's situation, you DO get a quality wideout shut down. We're not talking about a slot receiver, a #4 guy; Sherman is usually on a WR who would be productive in a normal game. The DIFFERENCE between a big-name wideout, and the #2 split end, is not as big as fans think it is.
And then, a completely separate issue, you gain the ability to overplay the left side, you gain predictability, you gain that "right side as blind side" concept, you create overloads...
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I'd like to see somebody knowledgeable even MAKE THE CASE that 10-on-10, 60% of the field, is not a catastrophe for the offense.
I don't follow NCAA football and that's all new to me. Muchas gracias amigo!
In the Super Bowl, you probably heard him... he was all "that takes away everything he's done on third downs, all the plays he makes out of the pocket..."
As a completely separate issue, the "game manager" thing seems --- > incredibly naive as to the whole idea of Wilson's learning curve. He was spending his developmental phase being prudent.
That concept, the "prudence while learning" concept, is one more way in which Pete Carroll was smarter than the rest of us. End of story.
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Drew Brees, the other short QB, was terrible his first 3 years, and jelled in his 4th. Joe Montana didn't start for close to two years. Don't know why that kind of precedent is forgotten.
A scary, overwhelming defense that first won with an immature QB, and then as Bradshaw jelled, added a great offense to a great defense...
My foggy memory can only recall 2 Superbowl winning quarterbacks that I would classify as punks, Jim McMahon and Joe Nameth (the definition of punk must necessarily change by generation). Neither one led a dynasty.
Namath occurred -- he was a childhood hero -- and yeah. After the one big year, his career was a disaster, in terms of W's and L's. The Jets followed up the Super Bowl with one fairly good year, and then lost constantly for the next decade.
Had forgotten about McMahon. Good catch. ... there too, if Kaepernick turns out to be nothing more than Jim McMahon, then 49ers fans will be disappointed at $20M per year. But the Ditka Bears had a nice run, something you would certainly expect if Harbaugh can keep it together...
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I would think that Jim McMahon would be the best historical precedent for a good Kaepernick run. He didn't exactly rip off a Brady, Montana, Aikman series of Super Bowls, though...
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Did McMahon's personality contribute to all of his injuries, I wonder?
It's funny. Elway didn't win a Super Bowl until he was too old to be a gun slinger. He won two after he was forced to 'game manage'. Steve Young admits that he didn't win one until he stopped believing that he was the best weapon and started believing that his job was to manage the game. Phil Simms won two Super Bowls 'managing' a team with a great defense, a strong running game and no mistakes. Bradshaw has a reputation as a gun slinger but check his stats on his championship seasons.
It's almost as if the pundits don't know how a healthy percentage of Super Bowls are won. Hint - it's not generally the gun slinger that is focused on maximizing his individual performance.
I think you'd see this sort of thing out of the Oakland A's more if Billy Beane got a top flight budget.
The strategy to slam the weak point is what Billy's been doing for 15 years now, whether that's OBP, prospects or TOR pitching.
In Seattle, we're seeing the similar game but with the money and a scheme that everyone has bought in to.
And it's not like the Seahwaks can spend all over the place.
Kaepernick is not as good as Wilson overall right now, but he is good enough to win a Super Bowl. You'd of course take Wilson given the choice, but the Niners will be happy to go to war with Kaepernick, and his teammates seem to love playing with him. His personal style is grating but he doesn't seem to be a bad character or anything and he's a pretty smart player. It's just that Wilson is a 20 out of 10 on character and work ethic.
But one of the most satisfying aspects of the Hawks rise is that it is timed perfectly to thwart the Niners title window...mwahahaha.
You want to see a childish punk who you don't want leading your team, look at Johnny Football. That guy is going to need to grow up pretty fast to have a chance of success in the NFL.
They flashed a stat at the beginning of the Packers game that showed his career passer rating inside vs outside the pocket - and it was basically the same, 100+. So this idea that he is just a scrambler, too short to see over the line, etc etc...it's mostly a myth. I've seen good analysis showing some of his blind spots due to height - middle of the field especially - so...what QB doesn't have a big weakness? Peyton Manning can't run, can't really throw deep, and throws a lot of wobblers. He seemed to do ok with the quick midrange game last year. Tom Brady can't run either. He seems to do ok.
That is the job of the QB and the coach/GM to build around a QB's strengths and hide their weaknesses. It's no different for Wilson. Aaron Rodgers is probably the only QB in the NFL with no real weaknesses. I don't notice that the perfect QB did so well against a killer defense. Personally I think the QB isn't as important as the average NFL fan makes them out to be, past a certain point of competency. Running and defense win championships, always. At QB, you just need someone good enough. (And not throwing picks is way more important than racking up yards with risky throws.) Having a great QB guarantees you winning seasons, but it does not necessarily lead to championships.
Here are Wilson's 2013 inside/outside numbers, showing that he is much BETTER inside the pocket than outside:http://49ers.pressdemocrat.com/russell-wilson-2013-passing-stats-insideo...
Kaepernick is the opposite interestingly...that is a guy you do not ever want to see on the move against you:http://49ers.pressdemocrat.com/colin-kaepernick-2013-passing-stats-insid...
Phil Simms would be panned today as well. ESPN has entire shows dedicated to fantasy picks. This bleeds over into general game analysis. Fantasy football has shifted everyone's focus onto individual numbers regardless of wins and losses.
I don't think I've seen Carroll smolder like that. He referred to "other than it being a penalty game," it was strong across the board. Um, yeah.
That's the 11th straight game the Seahawks have been outflagged, and last night the ratio was what ... 13 penalties to 3? Carroll pointed out that after he won the national championship at USC, it went on like that for four years.
What is football's thing against glitzy teams that are recognizable to Soccer Mom? The NBA is the opposite. They shuffle the stars around to create megateams.
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Let's say, for argument's sake, that the Seahawks have now jelled as the NFL's best team, but by a considerably slimmer margin this year. Do you NFL experts think that the refs are going to succeed in hamstringing them at some point? Or no?
I don't believe he is saying the Seahawks didn't commit penalties, it's that it isn't being called the same both ways. Things the Seahawks are called for the other team is not. Like we complain about umpires having a different strike zone for each pitcher. Do the Seahawks commit more fouls than other teams? I'd say probably, considering the aggressiveness of their secondary. But the disparity is glaring.
If I was even a half-way decent writer and researcher I could probably create an entire post about the officiating this year. It's been excreble. Not just for the Seahawks, either. Sure, every fan base will say their team got hosed by the refs - but this year some of them are actually right when they say it.
In the Arizona game, the non-called false start committed by the Arizona running back was very obvious - the guy moved a full step forward, then stopped. If he had continued to move and gone laterally then he's a man-in-motion and he's fine - but a stutter-step and then stopping is the textbook definition of a false start, and happened directly in front of both the referee and the umpire. Also in the Arizona game Kearse was called for holding and wiped out a TD - the official that threw the flag was directly behind the DB and could not possibly have seen Kearse's hands (which were inside the frame of the DB, not outside where someone behind could see them) to determine holding - he saw Kearse pancake the guy and assumed holding.
In the San Francisco game, the TD that was called back by offensive PI on Turbin, everyone "assumed" the flag was for an illegal pick. Turbin said he asked the ref , in an effort to do it correctly the next time, what exactly he did wrong. The reason given was not a pick play, but that Turbin was pushing (blocking) the cover man before the ball was thrown. In the official's opinion Turbin initiated the contact, not the DB. If the DB initiates the contact then it's defensive holding (pre-throw) or defensive PI (if ball is in the air). PI is always a judgement call. But, the Seahawks did benefit from no-calls too. On the punt that Ryan fumbled, we had an ineligible man downfield prior to the punt - the timing was thrown off by the fumbled snap and the center was 5 yards downfield before the ball was kicked. On Bruce Irvin's sack, he got a little bit of facemask. That one was less obvious, and it was hard to tell if his hand actually went inside the mask or was merely pushing on it. One is a penalty, the other is not.
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but it's no secret this year's emphasis on defensive illegal contact was informally called the "Seahawk rule" because of complaints the 'Hawks DB's were "handsy" all the way down the field. It's now a point of emphasis so it's going to be called much more frequently. What the Seahawks really need to do is cut out the mental mistakes. False starts, lining up in the neutral zone, or biting on a hard count and jumping offside. There was a big gain called back in the SF game for illegal formation - having an eligible man on the line of scrimmage covered up. It's no different than in baseball. Physical errors happen; we're human beings. But mental errors will drive a manager or coach bonkers.
As to the NBA's preferential (even deferential) treatment of superstars, it drove me nuts. If you ask an NBA ref, Michael Jordan never traveled and Karl Malone never committed an offensive foul as he charged to the basket. It doesn't drive me nuts anymore because I stopped watching the NBA after the 2008 season.
Collinsworth mentioned, on-air, that Carroll tried to get him and Michaels to pressure the NFL about it during their broadcast. Collinsworth actually did, in a mushy way; he directly passed along Carroll's argument about USC's parallel.
Obviously there are legit penalties by both teams, and some non-calls for both teams. It's in that marginal area, where the refs wipe out a touchdown with the Turbin call, that the Seahawks are being destroyed. Like you say, in an M's game ... if the other SP gets +8 marginal calls, that could be the game. Certainly it sets a tone.
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Conspiracies: you don't need a tinfoil hat, to worry about corruption in the NFL. Half the bigtime sports leagues in the world are quasi-fixed.
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Ya, good point about the NBA Brent. Spot. On. ... but the question is, why do their marketers believe that a three-peat is good for the sport, but NFL marketers believe it would be the end of life as they know it?
Just sayin'...
and how it's easily the worst in terms of action and drama of any professional sports league. Everyone agrees that the solution is to push the deadline back two weeks so that teams have a better idea of whether or not to go all-in on the rest of the season, but the reported reasoning the NFL has for not wanting to do it is because it would screw up the league's parity year-to-year.
Now, personally, that sounds like a bunch of baloney. But even if we granted the premise that a later deadline would increase fire sales in an attempt to ---> tank the season for the purpose of ---> netting a higher draft slot, all you have to do to address that is something similar to the NBA with its lottery system for the highest draft picks. That's just one of many reasons why that particular argument appears incontinent to me.
However, it does provide a glimpse into how the NFL execs might be viewing the value of their league. I mean, the heavily-referenced movie Any Given Sunday really does seem to be the league's belief in its own value. If games become more or less predictable based on the participants, officials likely fear that the energy level/excitement/interest will wane as it does with baseball and basketball when the scheduled game is a clear mismatch.
I simply disagree with the notion that sports fans are that fickle, however. Not to get too vulgar, but back in the Roman days when they would re-enact famous battles on the arena floor, everyone knew which side was supposed to win and which side was supposed to lose. It didn't detract from the experience; people still piled into the Coliseum or Circus to see it happen because it was a noteworthy spectacle. I don't think people have really changed that much over the last two thousand years, but the NFL seems to think we have.
And when viewed through this prism of 'maintain in-game volatility at all costs!' it makes the suspect officiating -- during primetime games, especially -- seem to be perfectly in-line with how a league would achieve apparent parity and volatility. It doesn't take a conspiracy theory to connect dots in the sky; every culture throughout human history has agreed that the constellation Orion is a hunter of some kind.
When it's obvious, it's obvious.
Watch this clip of the non call on KC against Baldwin, costing us a badly needed win. The ref is standing right in front of the play. And he still can't make the call. Incredible. It's one thing when two players are tussling for the ball, or for position, but when a player gets beat, like Baldiwn beats his man here, and that beaten player compensates with a shove to push him out of his route, it is simply a crime to reward him for that.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/football/2014/11/16/seahawks-doug-baldwin-on-t...
The head ref seemed overjoyed at the chance to lock things up for the Rams. LOL.
That single call, for example, can easily be the difference between 8-4 and 9-3.
I believe the NFL called out that play, though ironically it was ref'ed by the guy from Superbowl XL.
The Niners got 4 sacks, iirc, but man, was he dodging and moving, and then finding his open man. He also appears to be adding an element of deception in his read option, trying to hold the ball an additional half second on the handoff. It seemed to backfire a bit. A work in progress, I suppose.
Someone somewhere said he thinks the time is ripe to see the Hawks try a wishbone formation with Wilson, Turban, Michael and Lynch. There are probably a half dozen reasons not to, but wouldn't that be fun? Wilson and Lynch could really pull it off, and Michael as a pitch out option? Delicious to consider. After all, it's not like we have a receiving corps that can't be ignored.
Why not have C-Mike start doing a few of them? He sure looks like he's got the straight-line speed to pull them off reasonably well. I've often wondered why we don't run a fly sweep with an opposite-direction pitch option built into the play at the same time. So, basically, start with Lynch and Turbin in a pistol and have C-Mike blasting across ala Harvin. Fake handoff to Lynch up the middle, read-option C-Mike's fly sweep, and then if all else fails pitch it wide to Turbin the other way.
This team could do some really interesting things with its RB's.
Seattle opponents are consistently getting less flags when playing the Seahawks than they average against their other opponents. There are a couple of breakdowns floating around the web of this. I've seen two and neither of them deducted for the average increase in false starts for opponents playing in the CLink, so it's even worse than the initial look.
Here is one.
http://www.seahawks.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=99892
I wrote up a fairly long comment at Fieldgulls which I thought I'd transplant here:
Here's something interesting I found while perusing Russell Wilson's raw rushing numbers on ESPN.go.com. Russell has rushed 91 times, according to ESPN, and those 91 rushes have netted the team 679 yards (good for 11th overall in the NFL for individual rushing yardage) which comes out to a 7.5 average. That leaps off the board, as the second highest average among qualified rushers is Justin Forsett at 5.8 yards per carry, followed by Arian Foster and Jamaal Charles at 5.1 each.
That was the preamble, though. Just how big have Russell’s rushing yards been for the team? Consider this number: 42.8%. That’s the percentage of the time when Russell’s rushes (say that three times fast!) go for first downs (39 1st downs out of 91 total rushes). Which means that on just over two out of every five rushing attempts, Russell picks up a first down. In fact, his total 1st downs via rushing are 7th in the NFL this year, and two ahead of Frank Gore’s 37 – but Gore has almost exactly twice as many attempts (181). For comparison, Marshawn Lynch has nabbed 49 1st downs, good for 4th in the league, on 212 attempts. Clearly the comparison between a running QB and a smashing RB leaves a lot to be desired, but in terms of total yardage and 1st Downs gained, Russell is outproducing something like twenty teams’ primary running backs just with his legs.
I’m not suggesting Russell needs to rush more, but I am suggesting that this guy’s game awareness and ability to improvise with his legs are simply unprecedented.
Here are the numbers for Russell’s running game, along with the other top rushing QB’s this year for comparison:
Russell Wilson: 91 attempts, 679 yards, 7.5 Yards/Attempt, 39 1st Downs (42.8% 1st Down conversion rate)
Colin Kaepernick: 78 attempts, 353 yards, 4.5 Yards/Attempt, 17 1st Downs (21.8%)
Cam Newton: 64 attempts, 293 yards, 4.6 Yards/Attempt, 24 1st Downs (37.5%)
Blake Bortles: 39 attempts, 228 Yards, 5.8 Yards/Attempt, 18 1st Downs (46.2%)
Bortles actually beats Russell’s 1st down percentage, but he does so in fewer than half as many attempts, while Cam Newton is nearly as good at nabbing 1st downs percentage-wise.. But nobody matches Russell’s volume of attempts or rate yards, and it’s that volume which makes his rate stats so impressive. I’m also certain we are all aware of how his runs seem to happen in the opposite of garbage time, but I don’t have the ability to go digging through game logs to tally his 1st downs by quarter to prove just how clutch the guy is.
I love this guy. There is literally no QB I would rather have than Russell Wilson.
27-33% fewer penalties called on the opponents ... nothing the Seahawks are doing that feasibly affects that ... it demonstrates a solid bias to the reasonable view, IMHO.
But as we all know, that's not how the refs won the game for Pittsburgh in LX. They won it by throwing flags on big Seahawk offensive plays. So the 27-33% stat is just the opening bell.
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I like the idea that the NFL is just way overenthusiastic about "parity." Would prefer to believe that than, other things.
Here's another, more detailed breakdown.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eXcDwLAcKPNLiEFa7mIARF4s8OOFZd0m...
If you complain about refs without real facts the unsympathetic ear will respond with words like sour grapes or homer. And as you pointed out Doc, flags against opponents is something the Seahawks cannot effect. I don't see how this can be argued against or dismissed. In fact my assumption is that your typical Super Bowl winning team would see the opponents flags against go up as the other teams press trying to take out the champ. Plus the Seahawks are a team that just beats the other team up. Teams that are getting pounded on are the ones who make more mental mistakes and it's also when the attitude takes a turn south with the personal fouls that follow. The bigger the beating the tastier Holyfield's ear starts to look. One of the points I heard made about the 49er game was that on the play with offsetting personal foul penalties the ref never identified the Seahawk player flagged. The niners were losing their cool not Seattle but the ref flagged Seattle too.
As to the NFL's desire for parity opposed to the NBA's, I think it has a lot to do with the number of games per season and the number of teams that make the playoffs. The NFL seems to be making a bigger effort to maximize every dollar more than any other league. The NBA has 53.4% of teams make the post season while the NFL has only 37.5%. In the NBA bad teams can statistically be in the mix for much later into the season. The smaller playoff pool gives huge incentive for the NFL to want everybody average into the last 1/4 of the season. I don't think it's an aversion to dynasties. I think it's a desire for television ratings across the board in December. With so many fewer games televised per season the NFL tries to maximize everyone of them.
Your last paragraph sounds like the wisdom of Solomon to me... great stuff amigo. Tensions high in as many cities as possible, ergo TV ratings, that's pretty compelling.
I think somebody like Bill James would respond, though, that the NBA's playoff structure causes people to not care much about regular season games, last month or not ... or you could invert that to say, why wouldn't the NFL put 16 teams in the playoffs? 'course they could be moving that way ...
http://www.fieldgulls.com/seahawks-analysis/2014/12/1/7311285/pow-seahaw...
(Jeez, Klat ate my post.....again - shorter version below)
The link above is a great read. It puts paid to the conspiracy stuff. Check it out. The 'Hawks are not being overly penalized - they draw penalties, but mostly rightly so. It's the fact that other teams when they play Seattle, are getting far fewer called against them. The numbers are staggering, and for anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics, it's not explainable without there being an outside agent as the cause.
than to mess with the Seattle nerd-o-sphere. I'm only saying that half-cheekily; the Seattle area has consistently churned out top-level analysts for major sports franchises, and aren't exactly known for their go-along-to-get-along group mentality.
If the NFL doesn't correct this by the end of the season, it's going to be a major, major black eye that will get regurgitated throughout the entire offseason. As Richard Sherman might say, 'sometimes you've just got to let sleeping dogs lie.' Big, big mistake by the NFL here. Will be a lot of fun watching them fend off body blows in the coming months and years over this truly unthinkable example of corruption.