Five weeks into the NFL season, teams across the league are making a parody of parity. In a league celebrated for its competitive balance, in which coaches say that games come down to 'inches' and are won or lost on a 'handful' of plays, the bottom of the standings has ballooned with more teams that appear worse than usual. Nine of the 32 teams hold one win or zero. That list includes Tampa Bay, St. Louis, Tennessee and Kansas City, who are still hunting their first victory. Last season, three teams won three games or fewer; in 2005, '06 and '07, only two teams won three or fewer games; and in 2004 one team was that bad. 'Does it surprise me that so many teams are terrible this year?' Jets fullback Tony Richardson asked. 'Yeah, it is kind of strange. But I bet it will balance out.' The list is not specific to conference, geographic location or system. It includes long-tenured coaches (Jeff Fisher, Titans), first-year coaches (five) and a head coach under investigation for assaulting an assistant coach (Tom Cable, Oakland). It includes teams that lack star power (St. Louis), teams that acquired stars in the off-season (Buffalo, Terrell Owens) and teams that shipped their stars elsewhere (Cleveland, Braylon Edwards and Kellen Winslow). It includes teams with bad records that are shocking (Tennessee), teams with traditionally bad records (Detroit) and teams whose bad records come with built-in comedy/drama (Oakland). In the NFL, this is not supposed to happen. With revenue sharing, the salary cap, draft rules that reward the highest draft selections to the teams with the worst records and schedules based, in part, on the previous season's results, the standings are supposed to be swollen in the middle, filled with competitive teams fighting for playoff spots. Parity, they call this concept that is highlighted toward the end of every season. So where is it? 'It's cyclical,' said Charley Casserly, a former general manager who served on the league's competition committee and now works as a television analyst. 'That's what happens with these things. What you're seeing is the perfect storm right now.' Casserly pointed to two common threads. Most of the nine teams have problems at quarterback. And most are rebuilding, an unusually high number that corresponds directly to the number of new coaches implementing their systems across the league. Linebacker Bart Scott labeled the Jets an exception, because their first-year coach, Rex Ryan, inherited a team that won nine games the previous season and was filled with Pro Bowl players who already fit into the scheme Ryan planned to install. 'Those teams are trying to change the philosophy and change the tradition, just like we are,' Scott said. 'But when you go to those places, they have a lack of talent, they have to fit players into systems they aren't fit for. That's why you see them wholesaling everything out.' This strange season has given Washington the strangest schedule. After the opener against the Giants, the 2-3 Redskins met four opponents -- the Rams, the Lions, the Buccaneers and the Panthers -- who had not won a game. In Cleveland, the former Jets coach Eric Mangini has made headlines for forcing rookies to take a 10-hour bus ride to his one-day football camp in Hartford and for fining a player $1,701 for not paying for a $3 bottle of water he drank in a hotel room. In Tennessee, the losses have come one after another, in tightly contested games. In Detroit, one victory meant so much to a team that had gone 0-16 last season. In Buffalo, Kansas City and Tampa Bay, all three teams fired and replaced their offensive coordinators shortly before the season. Those teams have combined for all of one win, courtesy of the Bills.'There are lots of reasons,' Richardson said. 'But that's huge. When you've been doing something all off-season and training camp, and all of a sudden the guy behind it is fired, that's hard. Hard for the quarterback. Hard for the offense. Hard for everybody.' Because of the number of teams playing awful football, certain schedules can provide what appears to be a break. Take the Jets. They have problems on defense and a rookie quarterback, Mark Sanchez, but their next opponents, Buffalo and Oakland, are engulfed in turmoil and speculation over the job security of their head coaches. Should the Jets win both games, they would enter their rematch with Miami at 5-2. The Bills have lost two straight to teams that were previously winless (Miami and Cleveland), and fans in western New York have started Web sites and raised money for billboards to express their desire that Coach Dick Jauron be dismissed. In their last game, the Bills had nine false-start penalties. Jauron called the penalties 'discouraging, for everybody.' He stated the obvious, that the Bills had not moved the football with consistency, that they have struggled with injuries, that their offense had not scored. The team's owner, Ralph Wilson, has not ruled out making a midseason coaching change, although he has said he would prefer not to. Regardless, the Bills asked the Jets not to transcribe their conference calls with New York-area reporters. Either the Bills do not want negative quotes taken out of context, or they do not want their futility on record. (The team did not respond to requests for comment.) 'Unfortunately, we've run into a lot of issues,' Jauron said. He also noted that the great thing about sports is the possibility inherent in the next game, the next week. Even for the eight teams whose seasons appear over after five weeks. 'You could see a lot of teams in the two-win area at the end of the season,' Casserly said. 'And even though you have that number of down teams this year, virtually everybody else will still be in it. There are going to be years like this.' 