Feb 6, 2016 4 min read

Jayson Stark did it again.

Stark is an incurable seamhead who covers baseball for ESPN and he wrote a stupid column suggesting there is more parity in Major League Baseball than in the NFL a regular feature of Super Bowl week.

Actually, he doesn’t just suggest it. He calls it his favorite column of the year because “There’s no better time than Super Bowl Week to punch a really enjoyable hole in the NFL’s most widely accepted – but hilariously fictional – bit of institutional propaganda. Which is: That in the awesome and sacred National Football League, anybody can win.”

Stark then goes on to stupidly point out the irrelevant facts he believes prove his point.

He points out quarterbacks Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Ben Roethlisberger have played in 12 of the last 13 Super Bowls.

And he points to the Broncos being in the Super Bowl this year by mentioning that they, along with the Steelers, New England Patriots, Baltimore Ravens, and Indianapolis Colts represented the AFC in the Super Bowl 13 years in a row and 18 of the last 20.

Again, a stupid argument.

You would think someone smart enough to be one of the top baseball experts at America’s No. 1 sports network would know the difference between equal outcome and equal opportunity.

Somebody please tell Stark the NFL’s parity isn’t about every team winning an equal number of championships. And it’s not even about every team eventually playing for or winning a championship.

It’s about every team having an equal chance of winning.

The Steelers, Patriots, Ravens, Broncos and Colts had no built-in advantages because of their location on the map. They play in a league that doesn’t have built-in advantages and disadvantages for multiple teams based on where they’re located.

Not one of the five teams Stark points to as proof of a lack of parity has won for any reason other than just being smarter than everyone else.

OK, maybe the Patriots cheated a little, but you get my point.

Stark goes on to say he first started looking forward to writing this column Oct. 15. “That was the day we learned the identity of the final four playoff teams in a sport in which everybody knows The Same Teams Win Every Year.”

He goes on to point out that the Kansas City Royals, New York Mets, Toronto Blue Jays and Chicago Cubs have gone a long time without winning.

Stark misses the point again, of course.

In Major League Baseball, it’s not about the same teams having most of the success. It’s about teams from certain markets, the ones with huge local TV contracts.

And Stark can’t see that because of the NFL’s salary cap, teams that hire the best coaches and draft the best players are able to keep their teams together and contend year after year.

He’s obviously too interested in being a shill for MLB to point out if the NFL had the same kind of “parity” MLB has, Ben Roethlisberger would have played his last season in Pittsburgh in 2009, because he would have been snatched up by a large-market team in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston or Philadelphia. And maybe Dallas, which is the fifth-largest TV market in the country.

And Stark also doesn’t notice most of the teams he points to as being annoyingly dominant in the NFL are from markets that barely have a chance to succeed in Major League Baseball

You know, like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Baltimore.

He points to the Colts, whom I’m pretty sure play in a market not big enough to support Major League Baseball.

He ridicules the league because that team from Green Bay keeps showing up in the playoffs.

And he points to those annoyingly successful Carolina Panthers, who are in the playoffs for the third straight year and playing in the Super Bowl.

Maybe Stark hasn’t noticed they come from Charlotte, another market not big enough for a Major League Baseball team.

How can this guy celebrate his shortage of clues every year with such glee?

The NFL does have the closest blueprint a major sport can have for parity. It gives every team as close to an equal chance to win as possible. Teams are rewarded for being smarter than their competitors.

Major League Baseball is a parody of a league, with built-in advantages and disadvantages for teams based on circumstances beyond their control.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.