The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

For the last complete season in the

NFL 2010
The best team (NEP) had a W-L% of .875 the worst team had .125 (Carolina) : difference .650

MLB 2010
Best (Philly) .630 -- worst .346 (Houston): difference .284

NBA 10-11
Best (Bulls) .756 -- worst .207 (Minn) difference .549

NHL 10-11 (they don't do W-L % persay, but

Best was Van at 54-19 117 points which could be considered a W-L of .740
Worst Edmon 25-45 62 points which could be considered .357
difference .383

Seems like baseball than hockey have the most parity....with Basketball and Football having the least. 

 

Parity = Expanding leagues with new teams to make more money, while watering down the product because there aren't enough quality owners, coaches, and players to fill the rosters.

Win percentage is a horrible way to measure parity, as it is largely affected by the number of games played.  Compare the best and worst football seasons ever (1.000 and 0.000 win pct, respectively, with multiple occurrences of both) to the best and worst baseball teams ever (.763 and .130, respectively).  This is not a coincidence.

Parity is more usefully defined as a rapidly changing set of teams in playoff/championship contention.  The NFL does pretty well in this regard.

Afterwards I had that same thought....so I did a check on about 16 games in....on April 18th....most teams had played about 16 games.

Best team was 12-4 .750
Worst teamw was 5-12 .294 

Still a lot closer than football. 

If baseball played 16 games over the course of a season (read: less than one game a week) and their best pitcher was on the mound every game, I think the stats would look quite a bit different.

It's still a horrible comparison.

The claim usually bandied about is that the NFL displays a lot of parity year-to-year. I don't recall the last time I've heard anyone claim that there aren't spectacularly crappy teams in a given season. It's that a crappy team can become good very quickly (Dolphins from 2007 to 2008) and the reverse (Colts this year).

Don't ever believe in "parity."  They brought us the salary cap and all this other shit and really all it turned out to be was a new way for the owners and the league to split the profits. 

The only thing that shakes up any of the balance is that players no longer stay with one team over their whole career as was the norm even 30 years ago. 

You may get a team that has an "up" year but the rest of the league catches up sooner or later and the team is right back where they started. 

You still have a few teams that have been consistant winners (NE, Pitt, GB, Ind) and a bunch of teams that are whatever.

This isn't even remotely close to how the parity thing works. You can't use the best team and worst team for comparison- by their very definition, they are the outliers. Their stats don't count. If you want to evaluate parity, lop off the top three teams, bottom three teams, and compare the data set for the medium remaining teams. I don't know if it will make a difference in your results one way or another, but the approach that you used is not the best/only way to approach this. -EK

Dan is right.  You can't judge parity by comparing win/loss records.  By definition, you're going to have more statistical anomoly with a smaller sample set.  It's how teams like the Dolphins are able to go 16-0.  Is their feat more impressive than the Bulls that only lost 7 games?  When you're dealing with a 10x sample size, with baseball, you just can't make a comparison.

You're better off looking at teams season by season, and seeing if new teams are making thier way into the conversation on a regular basis.

^^^^^

Ok explain it to me then because when I hear "parity" I think a different team should win every year and everybody else should be hovering around 8-8.  And that's not what I'm seeing in the NFL.  I hear the owners and the commissioner talk about it and it makes me want to throw something through the TV.  The only reason I don't is because we don't have enough cash to replace it.