How does one win the Super Bowl?
What are the winning formulas for winning the Super Bowl and which teams can meet it?
In general, I see the NFL like I do the college football playoffs.
In the college football playoffs, you’re facing teams on a similar level. You don’t have overwhelming talent advantages because those teams have also been able to stockpile blue chip players at every position.
Well okay, that’s the theory. It didn’t play out that way this year with Georgia getting an Ohio State team lacking defensive tackles before treating totally overmatched TCU like a chew toy. Georgia had stacked talent in a way their playoff opponents hadn’t, although Ohio State had no excuses they just mismanaged their salary. The Frogs don’t even operate in the same world.
In the NFL there’s a salary cap and all kinds of different strategies for building a winning team within the constraints of the cap. One of the popular ideas in recent years has been, “you go draft a rookie-scale quarterback and then use the savings to build an awesome team around him rather than blowing your cap on the quarterback.”
Then the teams employing that strategy got beat a bunch of times in the playoffs or Super Bowl by teams with great quarterbacks and one of them (the LA Rams) blew a bunch of money and assets to get Matthew Stafford and immediately won the Super Bowl. So that theory is rightfully losing some steam.
So then how do you do it?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to America's War Game to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.