King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Three visitors win wild-card playoff games. Is this a sign that an NFL era is ending?
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Jan. 9, 2006 | For the second year in a row -- and the second time ever -- three of the four visiting teams won in the wild-card round of the NFL playoffs. I've been percolating on a cockamamie theory that something is afoot in the National Football League, that one era is passing into the next.
This weekend's results are a point in favor of my theory, even though the difference between visitors winning three games and visitors winning two -- something that's happened four times in the 16 years of the current playoff format -- was two funny bounces in the Washington-Tampa Bay game.
The New England Patriots were the only team to hold serve, pounding the Jacksonville Jaguars 28-3. Some things never change. The Pittsburgh Steelers routed the Bengals 31-17 in Cincinnati in the other AFC game. Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer was injured on Cincinnati's second snap, and he might have made a difference. But with the Bengals defense looking like a sieve in the second half, that's a hard argument to make.
In the NFC, the Carolina Panthers smothered the New York Giants 23-0 in New Jersey, and Washington beat the Buccaneers 17-10 in Tampa despite not having an offense. A tipped pass that became a LaVar Arrington interception deep in Tampa Bay territory set up one touchdown. The other was scored on a fumble-recovery return by Sean Taylor. Fumble recoveries are about luck. It's pretty much 50-50 whose arms the ball bounces into.
There are a few problems with my cockamamie theory. The first is that it's my theory, and is therefore almost certainly wrong. Second, I can't figure out exactly what is afoot in the NFL, except to say I just have this idea that one era is giving way almost imperceptibly to the next.
A third problem is that for everything I can point to in support of my theory, someone can point to something else that argues against it.
It's not cockamamie for nothing.
What I think is happening is that we're passing from the "Wait a second, I've been away for a year and now you're telling me that what team won the Super Bowl?!" era, which began in 1998, and into -- well, I don't know what. It may be nothing more than a sub-era, sort of an "OK, I'm not going to use italics or exclamation points, but that was surprising" mini-epoch.
I think the reason this is happening is that more and more teams are getting better and better at managing the salary cap, which was the force that created the "Wait a second" era, making it difficult to keep a good team together for more than two or three years.
You might find it odd that I'm using something unusual, three road wins in the first round, to prop up a theory that an era of surprises is coming to a close. But I think I can get away with it because none of those road wins can be considered upsets.