With Week 3 of the 2012 NFL season in the books it is once again clear that the only predictable thing about the NFL is that it's unpredictable. The Patriots, Steelers, Lions and Packers all sit at 1-2 (I won't get into officiating here as what's happened has happened and going down the "what if?" road is always a dangerous endeavour), the Saints are 0-3, the Vikings are 2-1 and perhaps most shockingly the Cardinals sit at 3-0. The season is young and we've seen plenty of teams throw away good starts and many others recover from a stumble out of the blocks, but these first three weeks have provided further indication that for all the preseason prognostication on TV shows and websites, there's still very little you can count on from year to year in the NFL. I'm going to try and explore why.
Sample Size
Not to get too enamoured with the numbers here, but any statistician will tell you that for the best results in trying to read into any group of numbers you want a larger sample size, and in trying to determine which NFL teams are best we are working with the smallest number of games in major professional sport. Sixteen games is small enough to be significantly swayed by random chance (a bounce on an onside kick, a bad call from a referee, a particularly bad injury to a star player, etc). Baseball is the most statistically driven sport there is, and a large part of that is because of the sheer number of games played - a 162 game season allows for statistical trends to play out properly and you get a real idea of who the best and worst are. The Super Bowl champion is nearly always a team that gets hot late, rather than the best team over the sixteen game stretch. A longer season might see these teams flame out, or maybe they were ascending to their proper peak. We don't know, and for that reason it's hard to read too much into straight wins and losses from year to year. For more NFL discussion of this ilk, read the excellent work of Bill Barnwell at Grantland.
Turnover
Every year NFL squads see a large amount of roster turnover, often extending into the coaching ranks too. Of a 53 man roster, teams might expect to lose between a third to a half of these players over an offseason cycle. This affects the extent to which teams can prepare for certain likelihoods or personnel match ups, but also adds unpredictability in that certain players may play well in one situation and not in another, or vice versa. For every high profile free agent move that pays off, there are about five that don't. Not to mention the in built parity measure that is the draft, allowing bad teams to make a great leap from one year to the next, be it with a transcendent player or a good class. Furthermore, all it takes is one or two big whiffs in the draft to set a team back for a year or two. No-one knows who these players will be on draft day (see Quinn, Brady), but they inevitably happen every year.
Ideology
Strategy and ideology in the NFL is perhaps more cyclical than in any other major league. The talent level in the NFL is so high across the board that coaches are constantly searching for any new wrinkle that might give their team an edge. Last season saw the read option attack raise it's head in flashes in Carolina and Denver. Both these teams went from poor predictions to playoff potential, with the Broncos even dispatching the Steelers in January. However, given the small number of games played each year and the 5 month season/7 month off-season ratio, these same coaches have an inordinate amount of time to study how to stop these same innovations. Cam Newton is already struggling to reproduce last year's stunning numbers and though Tebow has been traded, his new coaching staff are hesitant to plug him in to run what was such a devastating wrinkle last season - both for the same reason: the opposition is better prepared for it. The same phenomenon occurred when the Dolphins started running their "wildcat" offense. It caught teams off guard and Miami made the playoffs that year, but by the next season it was just another set of plays that the opposition was ready to defend. Devin Hester's unprecedented impact as a kick returner was also quickly neutralised when teams worked out they don't have to kick it to him every time. Any new gimmick or gadget is solved quickly - you get this dual phenomenon of teams trying to innovate but also trying to stamp out innovation at the same time. College football has such a wide array of different offenses partly because teams face so many different teams over the span of a few years that it would be impossible to be completely prepared for every opponent, though the thinner talent pool and the amount of time coaches have to devote to recruiting also play an important role.
The unpredictability of the NFL is what makes it one of the best sports leagues to follow in the world. As a fan of the Premier League despite it's hegemony, it is often a breathe of fresh air that "on any given Sunday" I might witness upsets no one expected, and that every year the champion could be a team no one saw coming the summer before.
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