Well what parity does is spread out the talent. What folks forget about those dominant teams was how much the rest of the league just kind of stank. There’s a problem these days with bad divisions, but they only stay bad for a couple of seasons. Back in the hallowed dynasty days whole divisions stank for a decade or longer. At least now things cycle around, teams float up. It’s now actually a challenge to keep a team bad for more than 5 seasons (a challenge sadly half a dozen owners prove to be up to).
I’m really hoping the Cleveland moneyball experiment works. We know it can work since that’s basically how the Pats are built, the problem is so far nobody is trying to copy that part of the Pats. If a second team can at least get good by actually properly valuing players we might see the bottom of the league lift. Heck even Jerry Jones seems to have figured out high cost free agents aren’t a good plan under a hard cap, took him 20 years but if Jones can learn...
When were the hollowed dynasty days? I was born in 1967, and I started paying attention to the NFL during the 1978 super bowl.
It seems that all of those great NFL teams had one thing in common: they all grew from a winning combination of a great GM and/or player personnel director and a great head coach. Bobby Beathard and Joe Gibbs in Washington, Tex Schramm and Tom Landry in Dallas, George Young and Bill Parcells with the Giants, John McVay and Bill Walsh in San Francisco, Dick Haley and Chuck Noll in Pittsburgh, etc. That's because the key to success in the NFL back then was building a roster over time and then riding it for as long as possible.