The saying “any given Sunday” held true. Any given week, any team could beat another.
Until now.
This past Sunday, 28 points or more decided six of the 12 games.
The differences between teams looking to make the playoffs and teams already looking toward April’s draft are about as drastic as ever in the salary cap era.
There are several reasons as why these disparities have occurred. Some of the major ones are discussed herein.
Ownership
When it comes to bad ownership, Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis and Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder are two prime examples.
Even though Davis won three Super Bowls with the Raiders, the sun has set on him but he vows to remain the Raiders owner until they win another Super Bowl or he dies. Based on where the Raiders have gone over the last several years, fans will have to wait for the 80-year-old Davis to do the latter.
Since reaching Super Bowl XXXVIII, Oakland has gone 26–77. With that track record, the Raiders have gotten high draft picks year after year, and Davis has picked bust after bust.
Tackle Robert Gallery hasn’t lived up to the hype and never will. Quarterback JaMarcus Russell is on the fast track to being a bust.
The selection of wide receiver Darrius Heyward-Bey in the 2009 draft remains a head-scratcher.
As the first wide receiver taken off the board, Davis could have taken the likes of Michael Crabtree but went with the speedster out of Maryland instead. Crabtree has five catches in his one game. (He missed the first five games due to a contract holdout.) That’s one more than Heyward-Bey has all year.
And then there’s Snyder.
Despite picking up high-priced free agents year after year and pushing the salary cap to its limits, Snyder can’t get a winning team on the field.
Since Snyder bought the team in 1999, we’ve seen a coaching and quarterback carousel. You need your hands and feet to count the head coaches and starting quarterbacks since Snyder took over—for the record, six head coach changes and 10 different starting quarterbacks.
And Jim Zorn’s days as the head coach are dwindling even though Snyder has said he will remain at the position for the rest of the season.
Snyder stripped Zorn of his play calling duties last week and hired Sherman Lewis.
Lewis was calling bingo games when he got the offer to become the offensive play caller. If only picking up a ping-pong ball and saying B4 was as easy as calling plays in the NFL.
And then there’s just how to build a team in the first place, which brings up my next point.
The Formula
There are different ways to build a team in the salary cap era.
First and for most, a team has to draft well.
If your high first-round draft pick is a bust, you’ll be picking there again. And if you’re like the Raiders, it becomes a vicious cycle of doing so over and over again.
This kills teams in the salary cap era.
Teams have to pay unproven rookies astronomical contracts—which is a completely different issue—making them unable to pick up high-priced free agents.
It’s also important to draft well in the later rounds.
To build a good team under the salary cap, teams must draft well to have young players that they can mould into good NFL players at an inexpensive price. For a player selected outside the first round, it’s all about getting to that second contract because that’s when he can make big money.
Teams can then decide if they want to pay these now high-priced free agents that they molded or let them go to another team.
Then comes the franchise quarterback. Successful teams usually have one.
Sure there are examples of guys who wouldn’t be considered franchise QBs that won Super Bowls—Trent Dilfer with the Ravens in Super Bowl XXXV and Brad Johnson with the Bucs in Super Bowl XXXVII—but they are few and far between. And they had dominating defenses that won games.
But typically, when it comes to winning Super Bowls, a team needs to be able to generate some offense, like Tom Brady and the Patriots or Peyton Manning and the Colts.
A forgotten component of successful offenses is the offensive line. Hard to miss when you consider these guys are typically the largest players on the field.
The guys up front never get enough credit. And if you look at good teams across the league, they have good offensive lines anchored by a Pro-Bowler.
A good line protects your quarterback and paves the way for the run game. Without that, teams cannot generate much offense.
This season, it seems that the factors that make a team bad are acting up all at the same time—with disastrous consequences.
I’m no GM and getting all of the above right is much easier said than done. But clearly, there are some franchises in this league that need to get back to the basics of building a team.
If not, the phrase “any given Sunday” could become a thing of the past.
Matt Sugam also writes for The Daily Targum at Rutgers University.
