Parity in the sports world can be defined as “participating teams having roughly equivalent levels of talent.” Specifically, the National Football League has experienced parity for several years now because of the salary cap. For those of you who do not know about details surrounding football and its players, the salary cap was introduced in the early 1990s and is still in place today. Basically, the cap is an amount of money that one team can spend on the salaries of the players on their team. No team is allowed to exceed the amount set by the NFL.
The salary cap is what led many sports lovers, like myself, to see the parity that surrounds professional football. From season to season, teams at the top of the rankings move to the bottom and vice versa. This year, there have been several examples of how parity is the most apparent in the NFL.
One obvious instance is there are several teams with 3-0 records who were not highly ranked at the end of last season. The New Orleans Saints, Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins have made a complete turnaround since last year. These teams have begun the 2013-2014 season with a perfect record. They may not be playing perfect football, but they are proving to football fanatics everywhere that they belong at the top.
Then you have teams like the Minnesota Vikings, New York Giants and Washington Redskins who have fallen to the very bottom of the standings. These teams made a run for the playoffs last year, but if they do not make serious changes this year will not be their year. The Redskins finished the season last year winning five out of five games. They have started this season with a big fat goose egg under amount of wins.
All this parity talk should make a little more sense to you now, right? Well, there are also teams like the Jacksonville Jaguars who despite receiving high draft picks the last few years just can not make winning a priority. They are the black sheep of the parity world. You would think they could at least win more than two games in a season. Think again.
Parity makes the excitement of match-ups every week more intense. The intensity leads to nail-biting games that end in a last second field goal kick or touchdown pass. Football is a game of a change and it all seems to start with parity.
