What happened to the competitive balance in our sports' regular seasons?

Remember when sports regular seasons were so fun? The rivalries, the excitement and the competition. The game. Just sitting in the stands or in front of the television to enjoy your favorite team or whomever is playing just because... hey, it's sports!

What happened to our regular seasons? Where did the fun go? Do we care, or are we just so over-saturated with sports options that it is just too much to digest? Did fantasy sports misplace our allegiances? These have long been questions asked at some point or another for quite some time, but why now does it seem to be a bigger issue? Maybe it just isn't us.

Maybe the competitive balance is gone.

Look what we had in 2016. The Golden State Warriors won an NBA-record 73 games. The Chicago Cubs blasted out to a great start and pretty much cruised the rest of the season as the odds-on favorites. On the gridiron, the Carolina Panthers finished off a 15-1 season in January, currently the Dallas Cowboys are 13-2 this year while the Alabama Crimson Tide has crushed nearly everyone during the season and is looking to win its fifth title in eight seasons. The Washington Capitals nearly topped the 1996 Red Wings' mark for best record in NHL history last season. Meanwhile, college basketball's regular season gets brushed off as nothing more than preseason for March's main event.

Even the teams that play the games kind of understand this. We have seen the Cleveland Cavaliers basically sleepwalk through the 2015-2016 season, fire their coach, yet go on to win an NBA championship. We saw the Denver Broncos win a Super Bowl with a version of Peyton Manning who stunk so bad that he was ultimately benched. Even now, the College Football Playoff has so consumed fans and analysts that we seemed to pass by a lot of what makes college football so great.

The irony is that we've also had one of the greatest years of sports championships ever. While Super Bowl 50 was a bit of an eyesore, it still had one of the best defensive efforts in history. Both the NBA Finals and World Series went down to Game 7 with the champion having to come back from a 3-1 deficit to win it (plus those Game 7s were epic in their own right). Oh, and the NCAA Tournament championship game ended with a buzzer-beating, game-winning shot.

All that shows that the best teams are equals, and these championship events have brought out their top competitive spirits. It seems that there is a bigger gap between the best teams and the so-called mediocrity that exists before the next gap that gets us to the worst teams.

But how did it get that way?

You can say that the talent has been diluted, but none of the four major pro leagues have expanded since the NBA added the Charlotte Bobcats/Hornets in 2004. The NFL hasn't expanded since 2002, the NHL last added teams in 2000 (though the Las Vegas Black Knights are coming soon) and Major League Baseball last expanded in 1998. The talent level shouldn't be an issue all of the sudden. College sports have taken a bit of a hit as the swelling of conferences has torn some rivalries apart and created less cohesiveness among league schools due to the infrequency in which they play, but there are more players looking like pros in college than perhaps ever before.

Is it the length of the season? Not really. After all, no league has expanded its regular season since the NHL did so in 1992-1993 (which was eventually cut back down).

Could it be money? I mean, we all know the difference between the wealthiest organizations and those small-market teams. Well, every league has either revenue sharing or a salary cap. There is free agency but with various rules in place in several leagues to attempt to keep stars where they are.

Even with these stricter rules in place, in 2016 we watched the Golden State Warriors plow through the regular season, while the Philadelphia Sixers won a paltry 10 games. There have only been 12 teams who have won at least 67 games in NBA history, and three have happened in the last two seasons. Though we are just a quarter of the way through the current NBA season, the Warriors and Spurs are on pace to eclipse the 67-win mark again. On the other end of the spectrum, two of the three worst records in NBA history have happened since 2012, and Philly is putting up another stinker.

In the NFL — which has the ultimate hard salary cap — we are seeing a team with a rookie quarterback and running back vault to an 13-2 start. In New England, Tom Brady can be suspended for a quarter of the year and the Patriots still don't miss a beat. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns are have one measly win through 16 weeks while the San Francisco 49ers (2-13) and Jacksonville Jaguars (3-12) aren't in much better shape. The NFL also continues to have just average teams winning divisions.

Baseball's regular season always drags during the dog days. Still, we had seven teams that failed to win 70 games this year (only three teams failed to that in 2014). Four of the six divisions were won by at least eight games.

Could it just be that the best organizations know how to do it while the others just continue to play catch-up? The Cubs blew up their team and built through their farm system to become the juggernaut they've been this year. Theo Epstein has now transformed two long-suffering franchises into perennial World Series contenders. No one argues about the Patriots organization's or head coach Bill Belichick's top-notch status in the NFL and their ability to find diamonds in the rough. The Golden State Warriors drafted Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green as the core to a team that has won a championship and gone to the last two Finals. The Spurs have gone nearly two decades as one of the NBA's best teams due to a great front office and an outstanding coach. Even Jerry Jones' Dallas Cowboys have been built through the draft and not so much by sparkling free agent signings.

That has also fed into an acceptance by the lower tier of the leagues that it is better to tank and build anew than to fight and claw for mediocrity and a possible first-round playoff departure. The Philadelphia 76ers have 11 players on their roster who are 25 or younger. The Cleveland Browns are loaded with draft picks for the next few years to fill up a very underwhelming roster. In baseball, several teams dealt their assets in order to acquire prospects to eventually build into contenders. In college athletics, the sizes of the conferences lead to unbalanced schedules, killing off of several rivalries. Also, there is now so much invested in the NCAA Tournament and College Football Playoff that it nearly swallows the season.

It can be a laughable complaint, though. Back in the 1960s, teams like the Celtics, Packers, Canadiens, Maple Leafs, UCLA basketball and Alabama football dominated their sports with championships, but competitive balance wasn't really discussed as a problem. There were less teams, less coverage and less movement of players. You could imagine the 1960s UCLA as a version of the 2010s Kentucky except the players stay until they graduated. The Celtics essentially got pretty much any player they wished via the draft or from cash-strapped teams looking to sell their stars. The point is we've had dynasties and dominant teams as well as bad teams for some time. So why now is it a problem that we have such a gap between the haves and have-nots?

There have been so many safeguards put in place to not only allow for the downtrodden to quickly resurrect their franchises, but also to stifle the elite teams from being able to keep their talent. However, now we as fans expect success to come quicker than it used to due to the salary caps, revenue sharing, drafts and free agency. Owners now expect that too. However, teams often have to supplement expensive stars with cheaper role players to fill out rosters.

Look at what most of the elite teams have in common. It seems that now you must have a front office that understands the loopholes and how to best manage these safeguards. You must manage contracts and payroll wisely, draft well, and have a little luck. Teams like the Warriors, Spurs, Cubs, Penguins and Patriots all have followed that blueprint to not only become successful, but to stay that way. Nearly every other franchise wants to emulate the top organizations but either lacks the vision or the patience to build a champion and fall among the pile of also-rans.

As the new collective bargaining agreements are currently being negotiated and ratified by our major professional sports leagues, it would seem that this trend of dominant teams lording over some pretty awful teams will continue. The organizations that understand how to build teams in those confines will have little adjustment and will be able to stay at the top for a good while.

That's because now, more than ever, being and staying competitive requires checking every single box. A team must find the right coach, the right players, and the right personnel and money people. Teams flat-out can't miss on drafts, must build the core from within and add the right pieces in the right ways. Oh yes, and they must do it while managing the cap, keeping players and coaches in tow, and keeping up with the endless amounts of data and trends to look toward the future.

There has always been ebbs and flows in sports on competitive balance, but it's a bigger deal than ever because in today's sports landscape, the rules are designed to level the playing field. What we've found is that all the rules in world can't replace the fact that it requires finding the right people at the right price at the right time — and keeping them — to sustain competitive success.