Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column over at ESPN.com tries to define parity, and fails miserably. He claims that the current idea of parity in the NFL is a myth because "supposedly parity is proven by an outbreak of close games." He goes on to show that there are no more close games now in the NFL than there ever have been. "Some earthshaking trend," he writes. But all that Easterbrook has done is to knock down a straw man of his own creation.

Easterbrook's main ammunition for his claim is a paragraph quoting Dick Vermeil in a recent New York Times article on field-goal kicking. Vermeil is quoted as saying, "with parity the win margins are closer than ever before" and Easterbrook uses that as the launching point for his diatribe. If he had read the rest of the article, though, he would have seen that the Times actually describes parity as something else entirely.

Here's the full Vermeil quote, with the writer's follow-up points:

“With parity, the win margins, the loss margins, are closer than ever before,” Vermeil said after rattling off an encyclopedia’s worth of kicking statistics. “The importance on the kicks is bigger than ever before.” Actually, that may just be the best argument against changing the rules. The age of parity may have had the effect of allowing bad teams to become good quickly, but, oddly, it has not made games closer. The average margin of victory since 1983 has ranged from 12.7 points in 1985 to 10.5 points in 1994, and there has been no perceptible trend, according to data from Aaron Schatz of footballoutsiders.com. In 2006, the typical game was decided by 11.4 points, he said.

In other words, Easterbrook takes credit for discrediting an already discredited argument, and then blames the original discreditor for giving merit to that same argument. (Got it?) But in his quest to show parity to be a myth, Easterbrook hardly acknowledges the article's most important point about parity—that it allows bad teams to become good quickly. Hence, for instance, the rapidly changing fortunes of the Saints, Ravens, Redskins, and Buccaneers from last season to this one.

When Easterbrook finally does get around to conceding that far fewer teams make the playoffs in successive seasons these days, he offers this rather unpersuasive comment: "More regular season games played and more wild-card slots offered should pretty neatly account for increased variation in who reaches the postseason, leaving the parity myth just that—a myth."

(If you're less interested in defining parity than seeing the definitive parody of TMQ, check out this piece at the hilarious blog Kissing Suzy Kolber.)