Even where parity reigns, not everybody will be exactly .500. The NFL is like one of those polls where there's a margin of error of three victories. Success is so fragile that three of last year's four semi-finalists have plummeted to the depths of the second division. The last three Super Bowl champions all failed even to make the playoffs. The whole league is so riven with mediocrity that injury to just one outstanding player or the surprise development of another can take a team dramatically down or up.
Few teams can succeed for more than a few weeks at a time.
But the NFL boosters celebrate this instability, and make it a grand illusion, bragging it's like in Lake Woebegon, where all the children are above average. O.K., in some respects, this sort of thing is good. Everybody has a chance, everybody has hope. Indeed, the NFL has virtually become a demographic hallucination, where little is big and rich is poor. Of the seven largest metropolitan areas in the country, represented by nine NFL teams, only one, the Washington Redskins, are in the playoffs.