Can Anybody Here Play This Game?

In 1962, Casey Stengel, manager of the worst baseball team in the modern era — that year's Mets, who finished 40-120 — wondered aloud, "Can anybody here play this game?"

Nearly 60 years later, people are wondering aloud whether anybody in the NFL can play their game.

Already, through just 11 weeks, every NFL team but one (Arizona) has lost at least three times — threatening to bring back the not-so-good old days of "parity," in which every NFL team lost at least four times — in 1979, 1980, 1988, 1993, 2002, and most recently, 2014 (and no team finished worse than 4-12 in 2003 for the first time ever — and it hasn't happened since).

This was the era of "parity" — or as some cynics called it, "parody."

In part, this can be "blamed" on the schedule format that took effect pursuant to the extension of the regular-season schedule from 16 to 17 games, which added a fifth game against a first-place team (from the previous season's standings) to each first-place team's schedule, a fifth game against a second-place team (from the previous season's standings) to each second-place team's schedule, a fifth game against a third-place team (from the previous season's standings) to each third-place team's schedule, and a fifth game a fourth-place team (from the previous season's standings) to each fourth-place team's schedule.

Yet that cannot possibly explain the rash of upsets that have taken place within the past three weeks — including Tennessee's Week 11 loss to seemingly hopeless Houston and Minnesota's upset of Green Bay, Miami's Week 10 Thursday night shocker over Baltimore, followed three days later by the Washington Football Team's huge upset of the defending Super Bowl champion Buccaneers, Carolina's 34-10 blowout over the Cardinals in Arizona, and then Monday night's rout of the Rams by the 49ers on Monday night.

The week before that came Denver's 30-16 win at Dallas, which no one saw coming, and Jacksonville's 9-6 "Big Balloons" — as the late Harvey Pack liked to say — upset of Buffalo.

So one of the two elements of parity — "bell-curve parity" — where the entire league is drawn to the .500 mark the same way that iron is drawn to a magnet, is palpably present (only eight of the league's 32 teams are more than one game behind the team that currently holds the last wild card berth within their own conference).

But the other element, "rags-to-riches parity" — and its opposite number, "riches-to-rags parity" — is nowhere near as prominent this season, unless one considers the Cowboys as an example of the former, when the only reason they finished 6-10 last season is because Dak Prescott (and even Andy Dalton ) got injured.

One could claim that the Dolphins are a "riches-to-rags" story — but then again, their plight is all too typical of what happens to a team the year after they had the best record among the teams that did not make the playoffs — the younger "sibling" of the much better-known Super Bowl Runner-Up Jinx.

It has been observed that all-time great teams like baseball's New York Yankees during the Great Depression, and the St. Louis Cardinals during World War II, help the country get through difficult times.

Suffice it to say that this will not happen this year — at least not in the NFL.