NFC Best

Parity is the word that makes NFL great. Lots of good things come out of parity, though it does have some negatives like it enables mediocrity across the league more than greatness in some teams. But one of the things parity leads to is last-to-first and first-to-last transformation of teams overnight. As rosters are bunched together so closely on the talent-scale, an addition here or a subtraction there of a couple of talented players or even some solid experience can alter the NFL landscape dramatically. This is why we see a whole bunch of new teams making the playoffs every season. The best example of this phenomenon this year is the NFC West. This conference was the worst just 2 years back. Seattle won it with an unheard of 7-9 record in 2010. A rookie quarterback, Sam Bradford, in a bad team almost won that division that year. Then in 2011, Seattle moved sideways, St. Louis took a step back, and Arizona went nowhere like they have been doing since Kurt Warner hung up his cleats. Jim Harbaugh grabbed the division by it's throat and made the niners the team to beat.

But this season, the NFC West has been the best division in all of football. Everybody expected the niners to be a Super Bowl contender. The seahawks were expected to be slightly better.  We knew Jeff Fisher will make the rams better, but not right away and we didn't know what to expect of the cardinals. Fast forward to the here and now, this division has the most wins in all of football - 15, with 3 teams tied with a 4-2 record at the top before the Thursday night game. The niners are still an elite team, their embarrassing loss to the New York giants last weekend notwithstanding. I am not even sure if there is anything embarrassing at all in any kind of loss to the Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning led giants. They are still the most under-rated coach-QB combo in the league. The seahawks and the cards are much better than originally expected and the rams have improved dramatically, at least on the defensive side. And all these teams will have some staying power through the season since they are all built on solid defense. All the offenses in this division are shaky, but defense wins championships and defense doesn't disappear easily either.

The niners-seahawks game tonight took on an added meaning because of the records and how difficult this division is expected to play the rest of the season. The game was a defensive struggle as expected, but the physical running game of both teams had some success against the other defense. It was fun watching Marshawn Lynch and Frank Gore run wild on great defenses, but that's what winning teams do. Frank Gore ended up with the better numbers and the niners won the game, but this game is going to repeat itself multiple times this season as the niners, cards, rams, and seahawks defenses lock horns. This was the niners first division game of this season, though the seahawks are already done with all of their road, divisional games. Nice win for the niners before they go in to the desert for a Monday night showdown with the cards. This game was a little bit of a letdown for the Seahawks after their impressive win over Tom Brady and the Patriots, but this season is still going according to plan for them for the most part. Their quarterback Russell Wilson is no joke. I have been waiting for him to lose his job to Matt Flynn, but he is a fighter and is here to stay.

In baseball, yankees lose, the-e-e-e yankees lose!