The American Football Conference has now won eight of the last 10 Super Bowls and has not lost a season series with the NFC since 1995. The Bears were certainly game, but, despite a yeoman defense, no match for Indy. Chicago remains at least a quarterback short of the AFC elite. It really didn’t require all that much prescience to write— as I did after the Colts came back from 18 points down against the Patriots in the AFC championship game—that fans had already witnessed the real Super Bowl. I couldn’t imagine the Bears pulling off the upset. As it turned out, Chicago got everything it needed to turn the trick—a Hester touchdown on the opening kickoff and three first-quarter takeaways—yet still never appeared a serious threat to win.
When we discuss the superiority of baseball’s American League—the St. Louis Cardinals’ World Series triumph notwithstanding—it’s easy to pinpoint some reasons for the gulf between American and National leagues. Most obviously the A.L., with the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry leading the way, has been more aggressive in spending on free agents, forcing even the league’s poorer teams to develop smarter approaches to compete. But with the NFL’s salary cap producing the league’s so-called era of parity, the discrepancy between football’s conferences is a little harder to explain.
Some who chronicle the NFL insist it is merely cyclical. After all, the NFC won 13 Super Bowls in a row, from 1985 to 1997.But just because it’s cyclical doesn’t mean it’s random. There is much that may account for AFC superiority. Clearly the AFC has a preponderance of the league’s elite quarterbacks; indeed, if there were an NFL start-from-scratch draft of signal-callers, I suspect that only Drew Brees from the NFC would join the top ranks with AFC stalwarts Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Carson Palmer, Ben Roethlisberger and Philip Rivers.
But the most obvious AFC advantage is simply superior ownership and management. Bob McGinn, a football writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, recently classified each NFL team’s ownership and management as exceptional, above average, below average or poor. He labeled almost one third of the league operations, 10 of 32 teams, as poor—and eight of those were in the NFC. That dysfunctional list included not only perennial losers like the Cardinals and Lions, but also teams like the Redskins and the 49ers that, before ownership changes, were the gold standard for the league.
The AFC’s overall strength makes it much tougher for one of its teams to reach the Super Bowl. But the team that does has a conspicuous advantage. While the Bears feasted on an inferior conference, the Colts had steeled themselves against the NFL’s best. Indeed after Indy’s historic comeback to beat the Patriots, the championship was pretty much ordained.
It’s now six months until the Pittsburgh Steelers and New Orleans Saints kick off the 2007 season with the Hall of Fame exhibition. That game will be played about the same time the football magazines hit the stands, heralding the 2007 season. Here’s betting that the prognosticators will give the nod to a bunch of AFC teams—the Colts, the Chargers, the Patriots, the Broncos, maybe even the Bengals—for the next championship. And no NFC teams. Still, come Super Bowl XLII, it will suit us to pretend that the game isn’t a mismatch. But it likely will be. The truth is that, other than nominally, the two conferences are no longer in the same league.
