Would the difference between the Padres and the Dodgers, say, be bigger than the difference between the St Louis Rams and the Seattle Seahawks? I seem to recall we backed the Rams to win that division.
that could be quite a complex answer but the shorthand is
- the NFL has a salary cap and free agency, and a team can go from bottom to top in a short time if it manages and recuits well including the draft
so the Rams have done that on defense (donald etc) but not so much on offense, and after placing the bet Bradford did his ACL for a second time. Bradford may or may not have been the answer to making the Rams more competitive, but without him and no QB they had no shot
- the MLB has no salary cap, has free agency but also its is extremely rare to draft a player and see him straight into the majors..they can spend a long time in the minors particularly if drafted from high school at 18
in addition the MLB has local TV deals. if you are in a big market, NY, LA, Chicago etc the local affiliate of CBS can pay a fortune for the TV rights compared to if you are in milwaukee, san diego etc etc. in the nfl, there is central negotiating of tv deals and money doled out in equal shares
so, with the top spending teams in the league at $200m payrolls and the bottom $60m and up it has historically been quite unusual for a side to go from bottom to top very quickly. there are barriers to doing so in acquiring talent, paying it and getting it on the field quickly
now, under this MLB commissioner the sport has introduced a number of measures to level the playing field including a luxury tax (penalties for over spending via payroll) and penalties for under-spending
this has had the effect of meaning payrolls across the league are equalised, and so the English premier league effect of it being impossible to beat chelsea and man city over a season is being reduced
as the artllce i linked to said
"Partly thanks to revenue sharing and the luxury tax — measures that former commissioner Bud Selig put in place to promote competitive balance — the high rollers aren’t outspending the second-tier teams to the degree they once did. Nor are the penny-pinchers falling as far behind. The teams at the bottom of the 2015 payroll rankings are much closer to $100 million than $0, which wasn’t true even two years ago. It’s not just the fear of financial penalties that has forced the big and small spenders toward the center of the payroll range. There’s also the impact of lucrative local TV contracts, which has enabled some teams to extend their young players instead of watching them walk, coupled with a return to pre-PED-era aging patterns, which has swung the pendulum of productivity back toward young players who can’t easily be bought.
While some teams are still smarter and more efficient than others, there aren’t many (if any) teams making really dumb decisions, and the lack of easy marks for the best front offices to hustle reduces the variation between teams".
so in the nfl it is still easier to back underdogs and hope they can effect quick turnarounds and win than it is in the mlb, but that key difference in strategic ante-post betting in the two sports is reducing, for the factors mentioned above
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