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The profound question that every Patriots fan and football historian will be exploring this week is whether or not Sunday was Tom Brady's final push for NFL immortality. Ali had Frazier, Magic had Bird, Jim Kelly seem to have the entire NFC, and now it would appear Tom Brady has Eli Manning. Yet the sobering question is thus: was this Tom Brady's last hope at a Super Bowl ring?

Over the next few weeks you will hear countless pundits and NFL personalities talk about "windows of success," and while there are no definitive timeframes on talent, there are certainly such windows when it comes to dominance. Unlike most aspects of our culture, sports carry with them a finite time period for dominant performance because of the physical and mental impact it has the body. After all, how many other professions are there in which you're considered over hill when you've hit your mid-30s.

Tom Brady probably doesn’t have a Nicholson-esque resurgence in him.

Let's compare it with another form of entertainment — film. One of the greatest actors of our generation, Tom Hanks, could keep pumping out movies well into his 80s and still be considered great by most reasonable standards. Jack Nicholson, who is 74, has done some of his greatest work (The Departed, A Few Good Men, As Good As It Gets, and Batman) after the age of 50. But can anyone offer up one name of a successful athlete who remained at the top of his game past the age of 40?

The same logic applies for top-tier producers (excluding George Lucas, because in perhaps the greatest movie "what if," if Lucas let James Cameron or Steven Spielberg direct and produce the last three films, we as Star Wars fans would probably not have to suffer through three films of shoddy acting). Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron can and will continue to turn out blockbuster after blockbuster, and they are way past the speed limit.

What makes the NFL different from film and other aspects of the entertainment industry, and clearly sets it apart from other professional sports leagues like the MLB and the NBA, is that the NFL is fundamentally designed to eliminate long stretches of domination. Very few teams have the ability to be the alpha franchise at all in baseball because the manner in which the league is constructed essentially prevents most franchises that cannot spend with the big market teams.

Neither the Red Sox nor the Yankees are ever guaranteed a World Series berth, but their odds of playing ball come October will always be greater than say the Rays, Orioles, or Twins, thanks to the markets in which they play. Yes, baseball has taken steps to compensate small market teams when they lose top talent, but year in and year out, the teams that have the financial flexibility are the ones that constantly find themselves sniffing the Fall Classic.

In contrast, that is precisely the reason the NFL is a far superior enterprise to its peers. The NFL realized a long time ago that in order for the league to reach both record popularity and record profits, they need to do the one thing most conglomerates hate doing: encourage the maximum amount of competition between each and every member of their members.

The only constant in the entire universe is the batting average Father Time. He always wins out.

The NFL forces every team to spend at least a certain percentage of their money on player salaries, which hedges against a situation in baseball where teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates, Baltimore Orioles, or (until recently) Miami Marlins take advantage of the revenue sharing. These franchises have ownership groups who spend less money on talent in a season than the cast of the Jersey Shore spends in a week of tanning and still manage to turn a profit with low attendance numbers thanks to getting tens of millions of dollars in luxury tax fees every year. But by forcing teams to put that money back into the team, the NFL has configured system where unless you have a complete and utter nitwit running your team, every year your club has a chance to win the Super Bowl — unless you're the Oakland Raiders.

Case in point: the San Francisco 49ers went 6-10 in 2010 and were considered one of the worst teams in the NFL. In 2011 the 49ers went from zeroes-to-heroes, won their division by a fathom — albeit a division with more bottom feeders than a hotel room filled with K-Fed, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Nick Carter, Pauly Shore, Ben from the Bachelor, and that kid from Two and Half Men, but an NFL Division nonetheless.

Then there's this rags to riches story: in 2000, the New England Patriots went 5-11. The following season, suddenly they went 11-5 and won the Super Bowl, thus bringing us back to the idea of "windows of dominance" and Tom Brady.

The NFL is too competitive for players and teams to stay atop for an extended period of time, even if they are seemingly one of the three most elite, and stable franchises in the modern game. In the NFL we can all identify what makes a team or organization good, and conversely what makes a bad team or organization well — ill equipped to consistently compete.

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