Excerpt from a USA today article back on January 7th:
?Cycles - To be sure, AFC dominance might not last forever if history is a guide. Since 1972, there have been three eras of conference domination of the Super Bowl, and each has been significant and enduring. From 1973 to 1981, an AFC team won eight of the nine Super Bowls. From 1982 to 1997, an NFC team claimed the Lombardi Trophy 15 times in 16 years. And an AFC team has won five of the last seven Super Bowls, from 1998 to 2004.
Season of superiority
But what sets this season apart is the AFC's regular-season dominance. While winning most of the last seven Super Bowls, the AFC's best record against the NFC was 38-22. During the NFC's near-perfect Super Bowl reign from 1982 to 1997, there were six times when the AFC won more interconference games and four years when the conferences tied.
This season the difference in interconference records was especially pronounced among the two sets of playoff teams. The AFC's playoff-bound teams were 21-3 against NFC opponents. The NFC's postseason teams had an 11-13 record against AFC teams.
"I don't remember a time when there was the disparity between conferences that there is this year in terms of the record," says Bill Polian, the Indianapolis Colts (news) president who was general manager of three Super Bowl teams in Buffalo and who also built the expansion Carolina Panthers (news) into an NFC runner-up in just two seasons.
"It may only be an anomaly," says Polian, who points out that NFC teams such as Chicago and Carolina were expected to have strong seasons but were devastated by injuries.
"But I don't have any other theories," Polian says. "I am as astounded as you at the disparity when you look at the comparative games."
Polian says one scouting service has told him the AFC is doing a superior job of drafting players - perhaps the reason for its dominance. Frank Coyle, publisher and head scout of Draftinsiders.com, says that definitely is the case.
"You can't say that as a group the NFC is better than average at drafting and in most cases their drafting is below average," Coyle says. "It's just the opposite in the AFC. You'd have to say the drafting in the AFC is above average as a rule and there are four or five teams that have done exceptionally well."
So does that mean the AFC dominance will last?
"I think there's a chance of that, because some of the elite AFC teams have locked up their players," Tennessee Titans (news) head coach Jeff Fisher says.
"Indianapolis and Pittsburgh have done a nice job with that. So I think that there's a chance that over the next few years you could not necessarily see a dominance, but maybe a situation where you could expect the AFC to win two out of three Super Bowls for a while."
But Fisher also points out that the AFC's record this season was bolstered by three playoff teams - Pittsburgh, San Diego and the Jets - that had losing records in 2003.
That cautionary sense of not reading too far into the NFL future is shared by Ron Wolf, the former Green Bay general manager who built the 1997 Super Bowl champion Packers.
"Everybody is talking about Pittsburgh," Wolf says of the team that had the NFL's best record this season, 15-1. "Last year they were 6-10, and now they're the dominant team in football. There is no science in this game, none."
Fundamental difference
Wolf attributes the 1982-97 era of NFC dominance in the Super Bowl to raw, physical attitude as much as anything.
"I had been with Oakland in the AFC for 25 years, (and) then I come to the NFC and it was an entirely different brand of ball," Wolf says. "It was a tougher league, just physically tougher, and maybe that's the difference now."
Sharing that opinion is the man who perhaps has watched more NFL videos than anyone, Steve Sabol, who as president of NFL Films will be at his 45th NFL championship game when Super Bowl XXXIX is played Feb. 6 in Jacksonville.
"It just seems like there's a fundamental deficiency in tackling in the NFC," says Sabol, who's putting together a feature on bad tackling. "The AFC is definitely better at tackling.
"In the NFC they're all projectiles - guys hurling their bodies, just hoping for the big hit, and then whiffing. They don't wrap up. We argue about it. We say is this a great running back and was that a great juke, or is that just a bad tackle?"
For those who analyze football with computers, the NFC has never been worse.
Jeff Sagarin, who provides ratings for USA TODAY on pro and college football and other sports, ranks 11 teams from the AFC in his top 12. Philadelphia, ranked fifth, is the only NFC team among the leading dozen.
An almost identical ranking comes from Herman Matthews, an associate professor of mathematics at Lincoln Memorial University in Kentucky who has been rating the NFL since the 1960s and whose college ratings were part of the Bowl Championship Series formula for three years. Matthews has AFC teams in 10 of the top 11 slots, with Philadelphia fifth.
In Sagarin's system, an average team is rated at 20 points. Last year the AFC teams averaged out to 20.55 points and the NFC's were close behind at 19.45. This season the AFC advantage was 23.23-16.77, a 6.46-point difference that Sagarin calls "monstrous."
"I can't remember ever seeing that before," Sagarin says. "The difference is astounding. It's truly an amazing situation."
Walking walk, not talking talk
Even so, AFC players and coaches are reluctant to claim superiority.
"It's unusual to see two 8-8 teams in the playoffs, both from the same conference, and that's adding fuel to the fire," Indianapolis head coach Tony Dungy says.
"But we played a few of those guys, and we had our hands full with Green Bay and Minnesota," he adds. "We happened to win the games, but we had our hands full."
Linebacker Willie McGinest of defending Super Bowl champion New England says, "The NFC is still a good conference. They've got a lot of good players over there, but I just think the AFC is playing stronger this year."
Matt Hasselbeck, quarterback of the NFC West champion Seattle Seahawks (news), feigns ignorance that there's a disparity. "Is there one? I had no idea," he says.
And Hasselbeck throws out a statistic of his own.
"Don't forget that the NFC won the Pro Bowl last year," Hasselbeck says. "I got the winner's share."
But a repeat of that at this year's Super Bowl would make for the upset of the season.
Contributing: Greg Boeck in Seattle; Scott Boeck; Gary Mihoces in Foxboro, Mass.; Larry Weisman in Indianapolis
