During the past two decades, I spent an absurd amount of time worshipping the NFL. I operated dozens of fantasy football teams, bought the latest Madden videogame as a rite of fall and spent upwards of 200 Sundays parked in front of a television watching football. That all changed before last season when I decided that the NFL had become too fair.

The NFL has zoomed past competitive balance and landed in a state of borderline randomness. Thanks to a rigid salary cap and non-guaranteed player contracts, it is nearly impossible for any team to maintain a long-term edge. In the NBA, which has a “soft” salary cap that most teams exceed by varying degrees, teams that make prudent decisions are rewarded. NBA teams that lock up players to long-term deals below their market value are rewarded. On the other hand, teams that overpay players are often crippled for years. As a result, teams like the Detroit Pistons, San Antonio Spurs and Phoenix Suns were consistently great throughout the last several seasons as they reaped the benefits of shrewd front office decisions.

In the NFL, such sustained success can typically only be achieved in one way: finding a dominant quarterback. While the Tom Bradys and Peyton Mannings of the world can break the mold, teams without such a quarterback have almost no chance of fielding a consistent winner. Each season every NFL team has the same budget to spend on players –– the salary cap –– and virtually every player’s contract can be renegotiated. A huge percentage of players hit the free agent market each season. Among those not on the market, underpaid players often hold out for a raise while overpaid players are simply let go. The consequence is an enormous degree of difficulty in gaining a competitive advantage.

The other factor that levels the playing field in football is the relatively short amount of time that the average player is effective. Aside from positions like quarterback, kicker and punter –– where players receive little physical abuse –– NFL players are rarely effective for more than a few years. While star players who stay healthy can usually play for 10-12 years, everyone else is lucky to play more than five. What this means is that even teams who do manage to find a collection of good players can rarely sustain success for more than two or three years.

The results of this equality overload are astounding. In the last three seasons, only Seattle has won multiple division championships among NFC teams. Eleven NFC teams combined to win 12 possible division titles while only five were shut out. If every game of every season had simply been decided by a coin flip, statisticians would have expected more teams to win multiple division titles. Among the seven NFL teams that played in but lost the Super Bowl between 2002 and 2008, Seattle was also the only team to return to the playoffs the following season.

A select few teams have broken away from the NFL’s random nature; most notably New England, Indianapolis and San Diego, each of whom has benefited from a superstar. Two others –– my beloved Detroit Lions and the Oakland Raiders –– have been spectacularly awful in recent years. Everyone else seems to enter each season with equal chances of finishing 11-5 or 5-11.

Half of the fun in following sports comes from arguing that one team is better or worse than another. In the almost complete random confines of the NFL, such arguments are rendered moot because so many of the teams are almost exactly equal. The parity in the NFL has even affected the gambling world, where underdogs tend to cover the spread more than 50 percent of the time for the simple reason that it is rare to find an NFL team truly superior to its counterpart. All in all, it is becoming increasingly difficult to follow a league where there is little rhyme or reason to predicting which teams will succeed from year to year, or often even from week to week.

The NFL has arrived on the complete opposite end of the spectrum compared with the MLB, where teams such as the Yankees and Red Sox have an inherent advantage due to their ability to spend significantly more money than other teams. While neither system is perfect, the NFL needs to find a middle ground between an inequitable system –– such as that of the MLB –– and total parity. Until it does so, the league has lost one of its biggest supporters.