You know.... I was sitting back, relaxing, having a couple of Sweet Stouts off the nitro tap, watching the Pats absolutely skullphuk the Bears yesterday and I started thinking... Is the Pats being as awesome as they are a good thing or a bad thing for the NFL as a whole?
At first, I was thinking it might be a bad thing. I mean, two weeks in a row you had teams talking about how they were the best teams in the NFL (Rexy does it every week and Urlacher pulled the same stunt last week) only to see the Pats come in and treat them like JV teams for St. Mary's School for Blind One-Legged Girls.
C'mon... did you SEE those two games??? Jeeeeeeeeesus. At certain points it was almost uncomfortable to watch even for a Pats fan. I kept thinking, "Jesus, I just hope a bunch of these Jets or Bears players don't just quit football after this."
So... if you look at the shear humiliation the Pats deal out to other teams and their fans, your first reaction has to be, "having such a dominant team in the league has to be bad for the NFL". BUT... I think you would be wrong.
I look to history to see if there is any guidance on the topic and I think you can instantly point to similar situations that were ultimately good for their sports... Michael Jordan... Wayne Gretzky... Tiger Woods... Hey, I'm not saying those guys are as good in their sports as the Pats are at football but that's as close as you're going to get. The Pats are more like those three... all added together... and then multiplied by themselves and then raised to the power of 6.
BUT... look at how popular basketball became during the Jordan years.. Hockey during the Gretzky years... and golf during Tiger's peak... I think that's really what the Pats will ultimately do for the NFL.
SURE... YES... OF COURSE some die hard fans of other teams will just get so discouraged that they'll stop watching football all together (I can see Dataz going down this path)... but, in the grand scheme of things, I think the NFL will end up pulling in a lot more new fans because people will have a need to watch something so historical.