Who's the be-atch now?

From the mid 1980s to mid 1990s, the NFC bitch-slapped a sad-sack series of AFC pretenders all over the field in the Super Bowl, the biggest showcase in North American sports.

 

If this period of NFL championship history were a porn movie, the AFC would be handcuffed to a radiator in a South Bronx crack house, working hard for its high before being pistol-whipped and tossed out into a dumpster. Yeah, it was that ugly.

 

The NFL's senior circuit won an amazing 13 straight Super Bowls from January 1985 to January 1997, and they did it in resounding fashion, running away in the title game by a three-touchdown average (20.8 PPG). The most thorough and humiliating beatings in Super Bowl history all came during this period. Washington beat Denver, 42-10 (1988); Dallas whupped Buffalo, 52-17 (1993); Chicago mauled New England, 46-10 (1986); and, in the most lopsided championship match of the Super Bowl era, San Francisco destroyed Denver, 55-10 (1990).

 

Of course, the NFL looks quite a bit different these days. Suffice it to say, the dirty crack whore is back with a big gun, a bad attitude and – surprise! – a clean bill of health from the community clinic.

 

While Super Bowl XXXIX turned out to be a fairly competitive contest – the AFC's Patriots edged the NFC's Eagles by three points – 2004 was the most dominant season by one conference over another in the post-merger history of the NFL (since 1970). The AFC went 44-20 against the NFC, a .687 winning percentage.

 

The AFC has won six of the past eight Super Bowls and last came up on the short end of interconference play back in 1995, when the NFC won 33 of 60 games.

 

But the interconference record tells only half the story. The rest is found in the utter ineptitude of the NFC last year. It was, by any measure, the worst all-around year by an entire conference in post-merger history.

 

A long list of NFC teams did everything in their power to miss the playoffs last year. Despite their worst efforts, the league continued its pesky insistence on sending six teams from each conference into the postseason. In 2004, that resulted in the NFC producing the weakest field of playoff contenders in the 85-year history of the NFL:

Things look even worse when we take a gander at the performances of NFC teams against quality opponents last season:

History tells us it's unlikely the AFC will be as dominant in 2005 as it was in 2004. After all, last year was one for the interconference-play record books. It's not reasonable to expect it to happen again. But we do know this: the early money out of our pocket is on the AFC to reign supreme in 2005 and in Super Bowl XL.

By Kerry Byrne