Chill out Csonka, Griese, Warfield: There never will be another perfect season in the NFL

The Miami Dolphins are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1972 team that defined perfection.

They played 17 games that season and won them all. No one has done it since and each year, the remaining players from that storied squad break out the champagne and toast each other when the last remaining NFL team finally falls.

Some see this as a grand tradition and raise a glass along with those long-ago heroes. Others think it's silly and selfish.

Here is some good advice. Stop. Not because it's ridiculous but because it's like saluting the sun rising every morning ... or the first time the temperature finally drops into the 50s in Florida in the fall ... or the next time you see Donald Trump at a political rally.

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All those things are simply going to happen.

Just like every NFL team is going to pick up one loss sometime, somewhere.

Let's start with the odds. According to quora.com, the odds of winning 20 straight games (50/50 chance of winning a game in 17-game regular season, plus 3 playoff games) are in excess of 1 million to one. With 32 NFL teams, that would give us an undefeated team about once every 300,000 years.

OK, that's a bit extreme.

Here is the reality check:

The Philadelphia Eagles are this year's last standing unbeaten. No one wearing aqua and orange is ready to start sweating yet; we are only 6 weeks into the season and no one had the Eagles going to the Super Bowl in Arizona outside of Pat's King of Steaks.

Perhaps it will be the Steelers next week or the Packers next month or any of their NFC East opponents. Someone will beat Philadelphia and Larry Csonka, Bob Griese, Paul Warfield and others will break out the Dom Perignon.

Why bother?

If it didn't happen when the New England Patriots were one Super Bowl quarter away from perfection, it's never gonna  happen.

Think of all the great teams that have hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy since those Dolphins won all 17 of their games when Richard Nixon was in the White House.

The Steelers won four Super Bowls in six seasons ... the 49ers owned the NFL while winning five Super Bowls in 13 seasons ... the Cowboys won Super Bowls in 3 of 4 seasons ... the 1985 Bears shuffled their way to a Super Bowl but they suffered a loss to - who else - the Dolphins in a memorable "Monday Night Football" game ... Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, for all their greatness, only came close that one season.

All of those teams defined NFL excellence. None went undefeated.

And, therein lies one of the reasons we will never see a perfect season.

NFL teams play games on 4 days of the week

In 1972, the Dolphins played one game on Monday night and another on a Saturday. Many of the teams likely to advance far in the playoffs in this era can have as many as three or four games on a Monday night or Thursday night or a Saturday. The NFL flex schedule could shift a playoff-bound team from a Sunday to Saturday game late in the season.

The Sunday-Thursday shift particularly plays havoc with visiting teams.

Besides the games being all over the place, there are more in the regular season and playoffs. That's obvious. What isn't would be the pressure put on any team that continues undefeated through the regular season and into the playoffs.

There is no doubt there was more attention than usual on the Patriots when they played the Giants in Super Bowl 42 in February 2008. Belichick and Brady made sure they handled all that pre-game hype well. But in the end, they still fell short.

How it happened makes one think the football gods also are on the 1972 Dolphins' side. Eli Manning's 13-yard touchdown pass to Plaxico Burress with 39 seconds was the game-winner.

But the play everyone remembers came around the 1 minute mark when wide receiver David Tyree caught Manning's 32-yard pass - pulling the ball down and using his helmet to secure the ball as he fell to the ground. Manning should have been sacked on the play, Patriots safety Rodney Harrison was all over Tyree and the catch was as improbable as Giants coach Tom Coughlin cracking a smile.

The day after the game,  ESPN named the catch "the greatest play in Super Bowl history" and it was later voted the Play of the Year at the 2008 ESPY Awards.

Shouldn't Randy Moss have made that Super Bowl catch?

If any receiver in that Super Bowl was going to make a miracle catch, it should have been the Patriots' Randy Moss - a Hall of Famer with 982 career receptions for 15,292 yards and 156 touchdowns. By comparison, Tyree finished his NFL career with 54 receptions for 650 yards and four TDs.

That catch, by the way, was his last in an NFL uniform.

As for Divine intervention, Tyree dedicated the catch to his mother, Thelma, who died of a heart attack that year.

As much as that game and that reception created headlines and hype, today's NFL is scrutinized more than ever before.

Take a couple of weeks ago when Tua Tagovailoa and the Dolphins were at the center of the non-stop concussion protocol controversy. If you turned on your TV, that story was being bandied about on ESPN, NFL Network and dozens of other TV and radio shows devoted to the NFL.

Think an undefeated team in the playoffs won't be put under that microscope along with coverage from the national and local media and the dozens of bloggers and dot.coms who regularly follow professional teams these days and Tweet incessantly. None of those folks were around in the 1970s when the Dolphins had to fend off pesky questions from The Palm Beach Post, Fort Lauderdale Sentinel and Miami Herald.

And, the Super Bowl had no international media.

Last, there is Pete Rozelle's grand scheme, which gets stronger every season. Parity. "On any given Sunday." Every team within a game or two of .500 late in the season and still alive for the playoffs.

The instances of a bad team knocking off a great team happen all the time in the NFL. A team with a losing record would salvage some pride with an upset of an undefeated team in December. That's why you don't even see many teams finishing the regular season with only one or two losses.

Then, there are rule changes, made to keep the playing field level in the NFL.

Many rules have been implemented since 1972, but none have affected the play on the field more than the salary cap and free agency. Back in the day, a team could spend whatever it wanted on players and expect to keep its core of players for 5 to 10 seasons. Today, teams are forced to over-pay a few star players and many of the other players switch teams every few seasons for better pay.

Many reasons why no NFL team has gone undefeated

Add it up - more games, more non-Sunday games, more media attention, more pressure, the P word, rule changes - and now you can see why another perfect season will never happen.

So, save your money all you 1972 Dolphins who are still around. Put the champagne back in the wine cellar. Don't even pay attention when the Eagles play the Steelers on Oct. 30.

Truthfully, those Dolphins were never trying to go 17-0 but as soon as a team reaches double digits and remains unbeaten these days, you start to hear references to the perfect season. It was not until the final game of the '72 regular season for the rest of the country to wake up and realize what was happening in Miami.

“From my perspective, going 17-0, this just may be me individually, I did not feel like that was what we were trying to do." Warfield said during a conference call last week.

"We wanted to get back to the playoffs. And it was not an easy chore to do so, but going back to that 1972 season – yes, our fan base in Florida and in the Miami area were following us and our reporters, our local reporters were coming by, as they do on a weekly basis to cover our football team, but the national media was not necessarily paying that much attention until, as I recollect, we got to New York to play the Giants, next to our final ball game of the year. Then all of a sudden, it was like the New York media …”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: 1972 Miami Dolphins perfect season will stand alone among NFL's unbeatens