THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 25, 1995 TAG: 9510250615
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Bob Molinaro
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
Circle Nov. 12 on your calendar.
That's the day the San Francisco 49ers visit the Dallas Cowboys. It's the day the NFL offers a superior Sunday diversion.
Finally.
Is there something terribly lacking in a sport that makes you wade 11 weeks into the season to find a single highly anticipated, wouldn't-want-to-miss-it national attraction?
Depends on whom you ask. The NFL is as popular as ever, if not more so. Check the TV ratings. Consult your neighborhood bookie. Phone Chris Berman.
Still, I'm not sure what all the excitement is about.
Steve Young and Dan Marino are out with injuries, and the most compelling player of the last 10 years, Joe Montana, is in the TV studio.
Of the NFL's 30 teams, exactly half have losing records. The two New York teams are hapless. The salary cap has brought almost everyone down to the level of the Tampa Bay Bucs and Indianapolis Colts.
And still, people can't get enough of pro football.
My trouble with the NFL, I suppose, is that I don't have a team. I used to have a team, but that's another column. If I had a team, maybe I wouldn't find pro football so tame.
I could root for my favorite uniform colors, even if many of the former free agents inside the helmets were strangers.
I could scan the standings and study the schedules. I could ponder the odds of my favorite 8-8 team sweeping into the playoffs. And wouldn't I be proud of them, too.
But when you don't have a team, you are a tougher audience. You demand to be entertained, or at least kept awake. And when you're not, you notice things like, well, the AFC Central Division.
Not a single team in the AFC Central has won as many games as it has lost. It's an embarrassment, right?
Depends. When the TV magpies get through dissecting the games and running the video of, say, the Jacksonville Jaguars' victory over the Cleveland Browns, you would think you had just witnessed a re-enactment of the 1958 Colts-Giants game.
By the way, does anybody still buy the parity malarkey? Probably not even the NFL spin doctors believe that one anymore.
I trust most fans realize that they are watching a watered-down product, a 30-team league that can't boast of 10 proven quarterbacks.
Let's give the audience some credit. Maybe the faithful understand that the No Fun League is a laboratory for institutionalized mediocrity but just don't care.
Even Dallas and San Francisco, the class of the game, aren't as good as they were a year or two ago. The gap between the NFL's best and worst has shrunk, all right. But it has shrunk because the better teams are coming back to the worse teams.
Which brings me to the Washington Redskins, and how their season reflects today's NFL.
An 8-8 record is not a reach for the Redskins, now 3-5. Not when you consider that they look forward to playing four more games against teams presently 2-5.
A fifth Redskins game, at home against the Philadelphia Eagles, provides another fine opportunity for success. Philly is 4-3, but its victories have come over teams with a combined record of 8-21.
Parity, or whatever the NFL calls it this year, means playing teams that are equal in talent. Equally bad.
The pro football season so far is what everybody thought it would be: a lounge act for the 49ers-Cowboys game.
Nov. 12 can't get here fast enough. by CNB