FanPost

The NFC South Stinks, However...

The NFC South has taken a significant amount of heat this season for being...craptastic (that's the nicest, non R-rated word I could come up with). That heat is certainly justifiable. I don't need to run down the stats and numbers that have been hammered to death. The most telling stat is that the 6-9 Falcons host the 6-8-1 Panthers in a winner-take-all NFC South showdown on Sunday.

Yes the NFC South stinks, but in terms of resume, the winner of Sunday's Atlanta-Carolina game will have a resume that isn't all that different than the 2008 NFC West Champion 7-9 Arizona Cardinals. For the sake of this post let's just use Atlanta as the comparison because nobody reading this is rooting for a Panthers win.

2008 Arizona Cardinals

Strength of schedule: .486

Strength of victory: .368

2014 Atlanta Falcons

Strength of schedule: .482

Strength of victory: .372

If my math is right, the Falcons SOV is going to go up this week by virtue of the fact that somebody they beat will get a boost this week because New Orleans plays Tampa Bay. New Orleans will finish 7-9, Carolina 6-9-1 and Tampa Bay 2-14. In 2008 San Francisco finished 7-9, Seattle finished 4-12 and St. Louis finished 2-14. This NFC South is better than that NFC West and I don't recall a lot of heat on Arizona for winning a bad division. So why compare Atlanta to the 2008 Cardinals? There are two reasons.

First off, that 2008 Arizona team hosted and beat an 11-5 Atlanta Falcons team. Based on SOS and SOV the 2014 Cardinals faced a tougher road to 11-5 than 2008 Atlanta did. The Falcons did that by virtue of playing 8 games against the NFC North and AFC West which weren't particularly strong that year. Still, Arizona is limping to the finish line and Atlanta already soundly beat them once and something tells me a little part of Matt Ryan would like to even his playoff record with the Cardinals.

The second reason, and the one that is probably obvious to everyone, is that the 2008 Cardinals went 9-7 and made the Super Bowl. After beating Atlanta, Arizona won the infamous Jake Delhomme 5 interception meltdown game and then as the four seed hosted the NFC title game and beat Philadelphia.

So will a team with a good quarterback and a transcendent wide receiver overcome the odds in 2014 and copy the feat of the 2008 Cardinals? Sorry Falcons fans, but no.

It's pretty simple to see why not and it has to do with the most important position in football. The starting quarterbacks of the other three division winners in 2014: Aaron Rodgers (going out on a limb to say they beat Detroit at home), Russell Wilson, Tony Romo. The other division winning quarterbacks in 2008: Eli Manning, Jake DelHomme and Tarvaris Jackson.

Also, in both 2008 and 2014 the defending Super Bowl Champion was the best team in the NFC. However in 2008 the Giants were cruising until Paxico Burress shot himself then the Giants lost four of their last five games, lost the top seed and lost their first playoff game to Philadelphia. Contrast that to the current defending Super Bowl champs and it looks like Seattle is peaking at the right time after last night's systematic beat down of the Cardinals.

So if the Falcons win Sunday don't go booking your flights and hotels to Arizona for the Super Bowl Falcons fans because this team's ceiling is probably a valiant, but sound defeat in the Divisional round, but at the very least when people talk about how terrible the 2014 NFC South is, you can point to how a terrible division produced an equally bad champion and that team went to the Super Bowl so football is dumb.

<em>This FanPost was written by one of The Falcoholic's talented readers. It does not necessarily reflect the views of The Falcoholic.</em>