National Football League

Rich Hofmann: NFL is tough to figure out this season

Published Oct. 12, 2010 10:11 a.m. ET

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PLAY IT LONG and slow, a song to the death of excellence in the National Football League.

After 5 weeks, no undefeated teams remain. Zero. Most every NFL team has looked like a complete train wreck at least once so far, and most look like train wrecks on alternating weeks.

Last year's two Super Bowl teams, New Orleans and Indianapolis, are on their hands and knees with everybody else at 3-2. Meanwhile, Kansas City and Tampa Bay apparently are good, and somebody named Max Hall, an undrafted rookie quarterback back from Brigham Young, just won a game for Arizona.

Twenty-one of the league's 32 teams have either two or three wins. The search for consistency is beyond elusive. Easily three-fourths of the NFL teams have no idea which team will show up on any given Sunday. The process of self-awareness is tortured, to say the least.

Now, most people would say the NFL has been like that for a while, but it is worse this year, more unsettled, and everyone in the league can see it as they frantically try to tread water.

"It's cyclical in a relatively balanced league that, every once in a while, you're going to have a year where it just doesn't seem like anyone can show themselves to be the obvious cream of the crop," Eagles president Joe Banner said.

He was standing in a corner of the Eagles' dressing room in Candlestick Park, late on Sunday night, after the Eagles' 27-24 victory over the winless San Francisco 49ers. His face told the same story that you see in most winning NFL locker room these days: happy, tired, wondering.

The Eagles are one of those teams, 3-2 and seemingly on the edge of disaster at the same time. They've been injured in some places, ineffective in other places, and maddening overall. But this year, they are like everybody else in the NFL. And while it is true that most Andy Reid teams are like this - slow to get started and to develop an identity - it doesn't make the annual process of discovery any easier.

"Even here, the 49ers are 0-5 now, but they're a pretty good team," Banner said, trying to come up with a theory for what's happening around the league. "But I really don't think there's any particular science to it."

Some people will argue, with merit, that the NFL has seen its number of "great" teams diminished in the years since the league collectively bargained a salary cap with its players in the 1990s. With the cap, it became impossible for such owners as Eddie DeBartolo in San Francisco and Jack Kent Cooke in Washington to stockpile expensive talent. More than that, the salary cap hindered the ability of all teams to assemble a nucleus that might sustain excellence for years. Even prudently managed teams had to let veterans go for money reasons. The cap really has done more for parity than anything.

If that is true, though, it makes no sense that in 2010 - an uncapped year because of the upcoming collective bargaining wars - this reversion toward the mediocre has been even more pronounced.

"A few of the teams that spent the least money - Kansas City and Tampa Bay spent low this year on the non-cap - are doing very well," Banner said. "You have the Cowboys and Redskins leading the league in expenditures. The Redskins are 3-2, but they've had to work hard to get there. The Cowboys are 1-3.

"I don't see it as a money thing. I agree with the premise, but I don't see a real reason why."

Nobody will ever know what Reid was really thinking when he changed his mind about developing quarterback Kevin Kolb this season and going to Michael Vick instead. Maybe it's simply that Vick is better. Deep down, though, you have to wonder whether, after 3 weeks of the season, Reid sensed that the NFC East would be a total mess - that the Cowboys were struggling and that the Giants were wavering and that the Redskins were tough to figure - and that, well, why take a developmental season with Kolb when the division might be there to be won?

It's hard to know. In the NFL in 2010, it's hard to know about a lot of things.

"Somebody at some point will probably start to break out of the pack," Banner said.

He probably is right. It has always happened that way, that somebody sprints to the finish in the final 6 weeks.

But good luck guessing who. *

Send e-mail to

hofmanr@phillynews.com,

or read his blog, The Idle Rich, at

http://go.philly.com/theidlerich.

For recent columns go to

http://go.philly.com/hofmann.

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