Rupert Patrick wrote: ↑Sun Jun 26, 2016 6:05 am
Back then you could pretty much pencil in most of the playoff teams, and the only questions were whether Dallas or Washington would win the NFC East and the other one would be the Wild Card, and who would be the AFC Wild Card, and would there be some sort of dark horse team like Baltimore or Denver.
Growing up in Pittsburgh in the 70's, it was a fun ride, but I can imagine if I had grown up in Detroit or New Orleans or Atlanta in the 70's, there would have been a lot of lean years. It was a case of the haves and have nots, and as much as Pete Rozelle was a supporter of parity, the 70's were anything but that. Back then before the season you could write off 60 percent of the league as having no realistic shot of even making the postseason, while today that percentage is about 15-20 percent.
In the 70's the gap between the best and worst teams was much greater than today. This can easily be analyzed if you look at the percentage of games in which one team beats the other team by more than five TD's; it was a lot higher back then. In the 30's and 40's it used to happen a lot, in the 60's and 70's it happened quite often, now it happens very rarely. That percentage you could call competitive balance (or parity) and it has steadily approached an equilibrium throughout pro football history. You'll never have a league of 32 8-8 teams, but with good management and a little luck it is much easier to rise from the bottom to the top these days than it used to be.
As far as records of the teams go, arguably one of the best showcases of a season illustrating a gap between the best and worst teams was the 1975 season:
There were ten teams that were 10-4 or better (and thus had a winning percentage of .714 or higher):
At 12-2 the Rams, Vikings, and Steelers, at 11-3, the Bengals, Raiders, and Cardinals, and at 10-4, the Cowboys, Colts, Oilers and Dolphins
And on the other end of the spectrum, there were nine teams that had a record of 4-10 or worse (and thus had a win percentage of .286 or lower):
At 4-10, the Eagles, Bears, Packers, and Falcons, at 3-11, the Jets Browns, and Patriots, and the Chargers and Saints were 2-12 as well.
All told, only seven teams out of the 26 in the league in 1975 had a record between 4-10 and 10-4: Bills, Redskins, Lions, Broncos, Chiefs, Giants, and 49ers.
On a side note, when I calculated my score percentage metric for each team, I saw great variances between the best and worst teams in the 70's in particular.
Out of curiosity, could a lack of free agency, and perhaps less refined scouting and drafting be a factor in this discrepancy between the haves and the have nots in the 1970's?