In recent years, plenty of observers including present and former players have noted the overall level of play in the NFL has undergone a significant decline. While it’s difficult to pinpoint a particular time when the quality switch flipped, the Covid-19 years of 2020 and 2021 represent prime suspects as the straws breaking the camel’s back.

It’s impossible to digest results of the Wild Card playoff round without noticing that losing teams, including the Pittsburgh Steelers, demonstrated they had virtually nothing left in their tanks by season’s end. The Cleveland Browns, Miami Dolphins, Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles each had been hyped at various stages during the autumn of 2023 as serious contenders for the big prize. Yet each one proceeded to self-destruct in the Wild Card round, showcasing uninspired or error-ridden football.

The Steelers probably deserve some exemption from this group, if only because few analysts following the team during the 2023 regular season expected them to secure a playoff berth in the first place. For the most part, it seemed the Steelers didn’t suffer nearly as much this past season from a lack of effort as from their overall dearth of talent and experience.

How bad was the overhyped, NFL Wild Card round? Winning teams more than doubled the production of their opponents, outscoring them 206 to 102. With the sole exception of the hard-fought Lions-Rams matchup, the second halves of the other five Wild Card games mainly qualified as garbage time. Thus did the NFL’s noisy Wild Card hype machine collapse ignominiously under its own weight in mid-January.

At this point, pro football fans can only hope the divisional playoffs and conference championships don’t follow a similar, non-competitive pattern. Besides the victorious Houston Texans who finished their regular season at 10-7, the Green Bay Packers and Tampa Bay Bucs also dominated their Wild Card matchups despite posting mediocre 9-8 regular-season records. During the regular season, Houston, Green Bay and Tampa Bay had scored per-game averages of less than two points more than their opponents. Furthermore, even the hard-pressed and patched-up Steelers defense surrendered fewer points during the regular season than their counterparts on any of these three advancing teams.

What we’ve seen emerge in today’s NFL is a collection of flash-in-the-pan teams largely devoid of coherence or consistency. It’s a league in which a majority of all teams blow with the wind from week to week. We’ve seen NFL training camps and preseason games marginalized to the point where nobody takes them seriously anymore. Not surprisingly, players on most NFL teams appear more poorly conditioned and less mentally prepared these days over the course of their regular-season schedules. The upshot of teams increasingly allowing their important, preseason business to slide translates directly to the kind of football we witnessed on Wild Card weekend.

As fans, we can only hope to see some reasonable recovery in the years ahead from what appears to be a deepening Covidization of the league. Of course this metaphor doesn’t imply that NFL teams somehow have fallen ill, but it certainly appears they have managed to significantly lower the expectations of both coaches and fans in recent seasons.

The NFL continues paying out larger sums each year while expecting less and less from players, coaches, officials and front office personnel. We appear caught in a kind of psychological pandemic where everyone comes to expect (to quote the former Dire Straits hit) “money for nothing and their chicks for free.” Unfortunately, this particular model of greed simply doesn’t work over the long term in a team sport. Ultimately, when everyone’s primary objective is to feather their own nest by producing less while earning more, the game gradually devolves into a cheesy caricature of itself.

As you watch the NFL’s annual playoff showcase, consider honestly whether what you’re seeing today is comparable to the level of playoff football we witnessed 20 or even 10 years ago. Do the teams competing in these divisional matchups really look as though they belong at this level of competition or are they still mired in undisciplined, uninspired football nearly five months after they kicked off the 2023 regular season?

Is it really true, as the league’s legion of well-paid hucksters would have us believe, that NFL football is better today than ever before — or does it actually appear that the league merely continues to slap additional layers of glitzy wallpaper upon the surface of a crumbling facade?