Aaron Rodgers

You can't trust the NFL anymore

Published Nov. 15, 2016 1:51 p.m. ET

Dieter Kurtenbach

The NFL has always had a bit of chaos to it, but there was still order in the league.

Good teams won, bad teams lost, and every now and again the sides would flip — just to keep us on our toes.

The NFL loves parity. Every week, it boasts about how many games were close in the final two minutes of the contests.

But what about the first 58 minutes?

There’s a lot of talk about television ratings and fewer stars and rookie-scale contracts and protests and penalties and over-the-top punishments and bad coaching and Twitter and GIFs — but that’s just talk.

Those things don’t get to the NFL’s real issue: The trust between the league and the fans has been broken.

Chaos is the new order of business in the NFL.

Chaos is not a bad thing — we watch college football for it. With the kids, anything can happen at any time, and that’s a good thing because if one game is bad, we can turn on another 10 contests and probably find something crazy.

But the NFL doesn't have crazy spread offenses, 100-man rosters, or a massive slate of games. In fact, there are only 15 games this week in the NFL, and four stood alone — so no matter how bad the game was (the first three were terrible) you had nowhere to turn.

When you go to a concert, or watch a movie or TV show, you do so because you trust that you will be entertained.

Do you have that trust with the NFL anymore?

It's a team problem. In a league of 32, there is only one team you can trust week in, week out, and even that standard was upset this season. But so long as Tom Brady is under center and Bill Belichick is drawing up the game plan, the Patriots will give you a good performance every week.

But we’ve seen that movie before, for two decades, now. Is that the best the NFL has to offer?

After New England, who can we trust?

We thought we could trust the Panthers — who went 15-1 last year — but they’re one of the worst teams in the NFL in 2016. This team still has the MVP and best defensive player in the league — some regression year-to-year is understandable, but this is beyond the pale.

The Packers have Aaron Rodgers — he’s really good — so they should win 10 games a year, especially in the NFC North, right? Maybe not. No one knows what’s going to happen with that team on a weekly basis.

Maybe Atlanta is good? The Falcons can throw it around well, but they don’t play much defense.

Maybe Denver is good? The Broncos did win the Super Bowl last year ... but they don't have that much of an offense.

Dallas might be good — the Cowboys are 5-1 — but we're a long way from trusting that team. That quarterback controversy could eat them up.

Are the Vikings reliable? We've seen elite teams in the NFL in years past, and while that Vikings defense is excellent, that is not an elite team. Sunday’s loss to the Eagles was a great example of why. How much regression are we about to see?

The Steelers? They were blown out by Miami.

Kansas City? The Chiefs were blown out by the Steelers on national TV.

And don’t even joke about the Raiders and their schedule-aided first-place record.

The second-most trustworthy team in the NFL might be the Seattle Seahawks, and they're not trustworthy.

The Seahawks are doing the thing they do every year — start slow, make people doubt them, and then slowly work their way up the gearbox throughout the season. When it’s all said and done, they win 11 games and are in the playoffs.

We’ve seen that movie before, too, but we can’t necessarily trust that the Seahawks’ problems from earlier this season won’t arise again.

Trust is the most important thing in entertainment, and that's all football is.

Building excitement isn’t as easy as saying “this game is going to be close.” Conference USA football is close — they have parity for days there — but we don’t watch it.

No, excitement is about building an expectation of consistent quality and then putting it to the test week after week. Then, it’s about putting up the mainstays against someone new, different and good.

The NFL doesn’t have a lot of the former and it certainly doesn't have a lot of the latter.

Can we trust that it’ll produce any more anytime soon?