Breaking: NFL Imposes Stringent Rules, Yet the Chiefs Dominate the Golden Trophy Thanks to One Thing

The Kansas City Chiefs will head into their third Super Bowl in a row Sunday, underscoring their dynastic reign over the NFL. The game will also mark their fifth Super Bowl in six years. The New England Patriots, who competed in nine Super Bowls between 2002 and 2019 and won six, was the last team to achieve such a dominant status.

The Chiefs have reached these heights despite multiple NFL rules and mechanisms that promote competitive balance in the sport. “The NFL really is quite balanced compared to any of the other sports in the U.S. or any of the [soccer] leagues we see in Europe,” said Victor Matheson, a sports economist at College of the Holy Cross.

Among its assets, the Chiefs have Patrick Mahomes, arguably the best quarterback in the league, and Andy Reid, a great head coach. But in addition to the concentration of talent in some teams, certain rules the NFL itself has implemented to create an even playing field might undermine that goal.

The NFL has a hard aggregate salary cap amounting to about 50% of the revenue the league generates that limits how much teams can spend on their players. In 2024, the cap for each team stood at about $255 million.

Leagues like the NBA and Major League Soccer have soft caps, which means teams are permitted exceptions. For example, an NBA team can exceed its salary cap if it re-signs its own free agents. Major League Baseball has no salary cap at all, although teams do have to pay a luxury tax if they spend above a certain threshold.

NFL teams also share revenue. As a result, the New York Giants don’t have all that much more money to play with than the Green Bay Packers, even though the Giants are “in the biggest metropolitan area in the industrialized world,” as Matheson put it.

“Every single game that’s broadcast on TV is negotiated through the league, rather than the individual teams, and then every team gets an even share of that TV revenue,” Matheson said.

During the regular season, the NFL will also pit top teams against other top teams in some games, and lower-ranked teams against their peers as well, guaranteeing that weaker teams will still advance, Matheson said.

But numerous factors work against these competitive-balance rules, said Kevin Cole, a football data scientist and author of the Substack newsletter Unexpected Points.

The NFL has a “franchise tag,” which allows a team to keep one impending free agent a year. There are two types of franchise tags. The first is an “exclusive” tag in which the team has to offer that player a one-year contract worth either the average of the salaries of the NFL’s five highest-paid players in their position, or 120% of their previous year’s salary — whichever is higher.

A team can also opt for a “nonexclusive” tag. This means that while a player can negotiate with another team, their current team has the right to match that offer and keep the player. “If they do not match it, that team will receive two first-round picks from the team that signed the player to an offer sheet,” the Indianapolis Colts’ website explains.

An NFL team can “tag” the same player a maximum of three times.

Not only do teams get to keep the best players, but they’re not paying them as much as if they were actually free agents, Cole said.

“It’s not like the NBA, where you see these stars move back and forth,” Cole added.

The NFL’s reverse-order draft is another part of its competitive-balance agenda. It places the team that finished last during the previous season first in line to make draft picks for the new season. But that rule can be a double-edged sword.

Cole pointed to a research paper called “The Loser’s Curse,” which found that top draft picks are overvalued.

“You get better players if you’re a bad team, but the thing is, you also have to pay them a lot more money,” Cole said. Meanwhile, the teams that make draft picks later end up paying less.

The NFL also grants teams “compensatory picks” if they lose more, or better, compensatory free agents than they’ve gained in a year. That group of free agents are ranked in the top 35% of NFL players, based on criteria like salary and awards received. The “compensatory” policy allows teams to acquire extra players in a given round during the season’s draft.

So even if a great team loses a great player, the rule gives the club a break that helps it preserve its advantage.

“All of those factors combine together to work against the theoretical idea that the salary cap is going to make everyone equal over a period of time,” Cole said.

And even with all the competitive-balance measures in place, there are factors that can’t be controlled. You just never know who’ll turn out to be a great player, Matheson pointed out.

“Even if you try to level the financial playing field, you can still have gigantic disparities on the actual playing field,” he added.

Some fans also claim that the league’s referees favor the Chiefs, although NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has dismissed this as a “ridiculous theory.”

Despite the Chiefs’ and Patriots’ winning ways, competitive-balance rules are working on some level, because their position in the pecking order is nothing like the dominance of soccer dynasties in Europe, where these rules are absent, Matheson said.

The Bayern Munich football team, for instance, has won 11 of the last 12 championships in Germany’s Bundesliga league, Matheson pointed out.

The NFL could jettison certain policies to make the game even fairer. For example, ending the tag rule would allow star players to switch teams more easily. But that could stifle fans’ enthusiasm.

“I think people kind of like the fact they know that quarterback is going to be there for their entire career, and everything’s built around them,” Cole said.

It gets the public more invested in the team and the sport.

“In some ways, having a dominant team is not bad,” he added. “The NBA was at its height of popularity when Michael Jordan was winning every single championship.”