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Sunday, October 28, 2001

By Ed Bouchette, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

In baseball, you get the New York Yankees. In football, you simply get the New. Upsets, upstarts and upside down are popular words in the National Football League these days. Pete Rozelle is long gone, but even the late commissioner's dreams of parity could not have been this grand.

Last week, when underdogs won 11 of 13 games, brought it all home, but parity has been here for quite some time.

"It's a crazy league," said Ron Hill, the Atlanta Falcons' vice president of football operations. "This is nothing new. It's the same every year."

The 4-2 Cleveland Browns, in their third year of re-existence, already have won more games than they did last season, when they were 3-13. But expansion Jacksonville and Carolina reached conference championship games in their second years in the NFL, 1996.

The St. Louis Rams went 4-12 in 1998 and won the Super Bowl in 1999. Why not the Brownies?

Here goes that word again.

"It's crazy," said Floyd Reese, the Tennessee Titans' general manager. "If we'd have talked in July, and I would have said, OK, Baltimore, Jacksonville, Tennessee, Denver, Indianapolis -- none would be better than .500, you'd have thought I was insane. Here you are.

"If I told you Cleveland would be 4-2 and San Diego would be leading their division, you would have thought I was crazy. That's where it is right now. We're in the middle either of a giant turnaround or just confusion. Everyone's wondering what the heck's going on.

"You look at some of the scores on a weekly basis. You say, San Diego had how many and Cleveland had what? Did they switch scores? Nope. Wow, this thing is really topsy-turvy."

The seeds for all this were sewn in 1993, when management and the NFL Players Association agreed to a revolutionary collective bargaining agreement. It provided for a salary cap and a salary floor, and free agency. That theoretically spread the talent evenly.

But there were enough loopholes that rich owners or those with sweetheart stadium deals could get around them initially. Those began closing when the have-nots began building new stadiums that brought in more money.

Then, the spendthrifts eventually were dragged down by the system because the immense signing bonuses were buy now, pay later under the salary cap. To some teams, it was worth it. Dallas may be among the worst teams in the NFL today but the Cowboys won three Super Bowls in four years. However, Jacksonville is in a free-fall, having shot its wad of money without reaching the Super Bowl.

The system also can be played by the smart. Good football people in coaching and the front office will prevail over those not as good, with everything else being equal.

The New York Giants, for example, and the Steelers have done well without over-spending or forfeiting the future. The Rams and Titans are others. Eventually, if a team remains good for a long time, it will have to pay more for its players or risk losing them. Pay the players too much, the way Jacksonville did, and you risk the future.

That's why there is a premium on good management and good personnel men, which is why the best coaches are getting $3 million a year and the best general managers $1 million and up.