The NFL's Bad Football Problem Goes Beyond 2016

There is no shortage of reasons not to watch the NFL.

You can take your pick. Its commissioner cosplaying as a visionary. Its pervasive refusal to treat domestic violence issues with empathy. The cabal of lecherous ghouls it calls "team owners." Its boorish crusade to stamp out fun. An exhausting, interminable marketing campaign to brand itself as our country's patriotic id. Its backwards-ass adjudication of positive drug tests. Its subsistence on quickly disposable labor and the ongoing effort to suppress exactly how dangerous the game is to that workforce.

Yet the simplest reason of all is the product it's selling: not just football but specifically the NFL's brand of football. NFL football, no matter how often anyone says otherwise, is awful.

This has been acknowledged throughout the 2016 season—sometimes urgently, sometimes quizzically, sometimes angrily—but the basic underlying premise is that football isn't supposed to be this bad. That the quality of recent seasons is a bug, not a feature.

Except that's not true. Pro football has been this bad for a long time—as The Big Lead recently pointed out, people have complained about the NFL's quality of play going on 25 years now—and it's not getting better, because this is how the league was designed.

The NFL's main selling point is the same as any other major professional sports league's: it has the best talent. You watch the NFL because you want to see the sport played at its highest level, and it has the players most capable of realizing that ideal. And it's entirely plausible that this current crop of players can do so with more speed, strength, and explosive power than at any time in the game's history. In theory, this all should be exceedingly fun to watch.

The problem lies in how that talent is distributed. The league's basic economic structure features a collective bargaining agreement built on a hard salary cap and non-guaranteed contracts, which dramatically constrains a team's capacity to retain its own players. It's a perfect recipe for parity, and that in turn is great for business. Fewer dominant teams promises more opportunity for everyone, giving more fan bases a reason to pay attention and invest in the product.

But it's horribly detrimental to the actual football. Roster balance is impossible to achieve for anyone not starting a quarterback on a rookie contract, and impossible to sustain once those quarterbacks are furnished a suitable (read: dramatically inflated relative to every other position) second contract. Gone are the two-way powerhouses of the pre-free agency era; the 1990s Cowboys and 49ers, to name two of the most recent examples, had rosters gleaming with Pro Bowlers on both sides of the ball. In their stead are teams that skew heavily to either offense or defense, oftentimes at the total expense of the other, for no reason other than the difficulty to allocate suitable resources on both sides and remain under the hard cap.

I examined the participants in the last 16 Super Bowls using Football Outsiders' Value Over Average (VOA) system, which essentially adjusts teams' production for their strength of schedule. (Here's the site's more in-depth explanation.) And the quality is startlingly low among the supposed best the NFL has to offer. Just ten of the last 32 teams appearing in the Super Bowl ranked in the upper third of the league in both offense and defense. An equal number of teams had a differential of 15 or more spots between its offensive and defensive ranks. Truly elite teams that are balanced on both sides of the ball are a rarity. Only four—the 2007 Colts, the 2014 Broncos, and the 2014 and 2015 Seahawks—cracked the top five in both offense and defense (and only two of those actually won the title).

And these are the teams vying for most mythologized championship in sports.

This watering down of the league would be bad enough on its own, but the product is becoming increasingly homogenized, too. It's not exactly a secret that the NFL continues to position itself as a passing league. The rules have been repeatedly tweaked, most notably in 1994 and 2004, to tilt the scales in that direction.

Unsurprisingly, teams are throwing the ball more than they ever have: 21 of the league's top 25 single-season passing marks by a quarterback have been set over the last ten seasons, and the last four years have seen the highest amount of pass attempts per game in NFL history. You can certainly argue that the position is being handled better than it ever has been; ESPN's Bill Barnwell pointed out last month that today's quarterbacks complete more passes and throw fewer interception than they did ten years ago. And, as Ty Schalter has pointed out elsewhere on this site, that not only leads to more points but also more fourth-quarter comebacks.

But Barnwell himself acknowledges that the yardage data isn't available for those throws and, as Rivers McCown noted for VICE Sports, efficiency does not necessarily equal ability. Rather, NFL passing has been refined into a specialization within a specialization: Spamming safe, mid-range throws ad nauseum and exploiting the league's Charmin-soft rubric for defensive pass interference to stack yards in the most obvious ways possible.

It's brutally effective and miserably dull, siphoning off stylistic diversity—Dallas is now considered iconoclastic simply by leaning on a power run game. Nor is it more effective at minting stars in the shotgun, what with half of NFL franchises replacing their starting quarterbacks over the same four-year period. The league's parity model promises unpredictability—the playoffs are wide open this season, and your team could be there!—but that is blunted by the collection of half-realized teams relying on the same strain of football to upend each other.

Salvation is unlikely to come from innovation, at least not from within the NFL. For one, coaches aren't exactly given a lot of time or room to experiment. In an analysis of head coaching turnover for The Cauldron, Donovan Rose found that, over the last decade, the average lifespan for a NFL coach who reaches the playoffs at least once is a comically short 4.4 seasons, while coaches without postseason appearances stuck around only 2.1 seasons. Currently, nine of the league's 32 coaches, or 28.1 percent, were hired before 2012. Some of this is endemic to pro sports; in Major League Baseball, for instance, 30 percent of managers have been with their teams since before 2012, and in the NBA it's only 13 percent. But in football, the ends don't seem to even justify the means. According to Rose, "Despite all the new hires, success looks like flipping a coin; 36 coaches (48 percent) fared better than their predecessors when it comes to win percentage, while the rest had an equal or worse win percentage."

It isn't just churn—it's a massive spin cycle. There's simply no incentive to take any sort of risk on the field when NFL front offices are so overwhelmingly disposed to changing leadership at the slightest misstep.

Perhaps that's why the NFL's preferred means of modernizing is to appropriate the college game. On offense alone, the NFL has re-integrated the option after the college game never stopped running it, and added the zone read, package plays, air raid and spread principles. And that's just the useful stuff—let's not delve into how many teams tried to co-opt the Wildcat. More often than not, those tweaks arrive after a considerable period of huffing about how such bush league tactics could never fly at the professional level, which perhaps explains the NFL's refusal to adopt genuinely useful ideas, such as replacing its stale, tie-inducing overtime with the vastly more entertaining college version. It only reinforces the feeling of stagnation, that the product that represents the sport's pinnacle is too obstinate or shortsighted, or both, to become truly dynamic.

The aesthetics could be helped a great deal could be helped simply by playing the game competently. Penalties have surged over these last four seasons, culminating in this year's mark of 13.9 accepted penalties per game and while a not inconsiderable portion involve the the league over- moralizing of excessive celebration—which, given Roger Goodell's own proclamation that taunting penalties are " a serious issue," will probably get worse well before it's better—plenty more are the sort of infractions that come from fundamental errors playing a position poorly, from pass interference on wayward defensive backs to false starts on overeager offensive linemen to offside calls on trigger happy pass rushers. (That's only one strain of bad officiating, mind you: This is a league that cannot dependably adjudicate what a catch or a clean hit is nearly a century into its existence, and have swung entire games because of it.)

The leading culprit here could be the gradual lowering of the NFL's average player age, something coaches and personnel men alike bemoaned to The Ringer's Kevin Clark earlier this year. The influx of younger, greener players entails sloppier play from athletes who still have not reached physical maturity. It also, as Ravens head coach John Harbaugh told Clark, "is a real serious concern, [n]ot just for the quality of the game, but for the well-being of these young guys coming into the NFL."

By "well-being," Harbaugh means injuries, which, as Football Outsiders revealed in a 2015 study, have climbed significantly since the turn of the century in overall number and average games missed. Attempts to address player safety have been woefully inadequate, in other words, something that first and foremost is deleterious to the health of the players, but it also further dilutes the quality of play when key contributors miss action.

Even diminished, however, the NFL remains a ratings bonanza, and it figures to remain that way so long as its problems are discussed as yearly aberrations rather than a longstanding, often deliberate confluence of mediocrity. Of course, the NFL has control over the market either way—this is where the best football players on earth congregate, after all. No one has to turn it off, if they don't want to. It's just time to recognize that the highest level of football won't provide you the very best of the game.

Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter.