Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. It used to be one of the endearing aspects of the National Football League that you couldn't always be quite sure which teams really wanted to win it. Now there's a case to be made that what you see is what you get.

Joe Kernan, whose Armagh teams had sometimes been suspected of not killing themselves once qualified for the league play-offs, is even anxious to underline the importance of the competition that his county tries to win for the first time this weekend.

"In three of my four years in charge we've qualified for the semi-finals," he says. "We did play badly against Laois in 2002 (a performance that was later acknowledged as a catalyst in their drive for that year's All-Ireland), but in 2003 we had five senior players out injured and last year we only narrowly missed out on qualifying."

Unlike its hurling equivalent, currently up on the trolley being examined for signs of life by learned committees while a nearby monitor flatlines, the football league is in good shape.

It may not be the white-hot reality of the championship, but it is competitive and provides an excellent lead-in to the championship. Football, not being as badly affected by the depredations of spring weather as can be the case with hurling, functions quite well early in the year.

Football also has the advantage of fitting quite snugly into a divisional format with healthy competition to secure promotion and avoid relegation.

Direct connections between league success and championship follow-up have also become more common in the past two years, but even in general there have been signs that the league is a useful vehicle for self-improvement. Since the current format came into being five seasons ago, there has been a decent, open structure that by next Sunday evening will have seen 10 different counties win the 12 titles on offer since 2000.

Finals day has become an annual event at Croke Park (with the exception of 2002, when building work prevented it) and an occasion worth reaching, particularly for the Division Two counties from outside Leinster which aren't familiar with the stadium. That motivation is acknowledged by Monaghan manager Séamus McEnaney, whose county will be making their debut in the new Croke Park this weekend.

"At the start of the year we set out our immediate goals," he said after the surprising win over Derry. "Promotion was the first target, and after that we wanted to play at headquarters. This was a great result for a new batch of lads. It's 20 years since we won a league title. So this opportunity is brilliant for us."

The enhanced status of the league owes something to a few influences. First, the sheer logic of success: the last two All-Ireland champions have also won the league in the same year, so the at times superstitious reluctance to do well early in the year - as well as the more rational impulse for teams to pace themselves - have now been questioned.

Second, the introduction of the calendar-year format in 2001 has given teams a realistic and defined season for the first time, building from the secondary competitions in January through the league and into the championship. This has replaced the rambling schedule of old, which obliged teams to convene in the autumn - within weeks of the All-Ireland - play a few matches and then break for two months. Some sides which had had good championship runs were sufficiently fit to keep going; others were just jaded.

For those that didn't make a good start, the league was generally over by Christmas with only a relegation fight to come in the spring. All the more puzzling then to have had a motion tabled at congress by Meath, looking to revert to the old, staggered format starting in October.

It's certainly not a notion that would find favour with the vast bulk of county managers (a year after the format had been adopted a survey of 14 managers, conducted by this newspaper, turned up only one adamantly opposed).

It's a bit too early to say whether the double success of Kerry and Tyrone is going to set a trend.

The National Football League will next season be 80 years on the go. In that time 18 teams have won it and the All-Ireland in the same year and five times that has happened in two consecutive years (2003-04, 1988-89, 1968-69, 1958-59 and 1931-32) - but only once in three successive years (1958-60), so Armagh or Wexford could equal a record next September.

The advent of the qualifier system, which largely coincides with the current league format, doesn't appear to have changed attitudes to the Football League.

Theoretically doing well in the spring should make it harder for a side to progress through the highways and byways of the qualifiers, but there has been one statistical exception. Galway in 2001, the first year of the qualifiers, reached the league final and went on to become the only team to lose a championship match - as well as the seventh team to lose a league final - en route to All-Ireland success.

The provincial system has always had an indirect influence on the league. Eight of the 18 teams to win the league-All-Ireland double have been from Kerry.

Historically Kerry have the easiest provincial championship, and that is an advantage when trying to combine two successful campaigns in the one year.

But the success of Tyrone two years ago was a new phenomenon given that Ulster is such a competitive province. It was also hard going, with two of the ties (against Derry and Down) needing replays.

Nonetheless, the double triumph was a vindication of Mickey Harte's approach to training, which puts a priority on a sequence of competitive fixtures and avoids challenge matches, focusing minds on the advantages of maintaining a competitive rhythm throughout the season.

So far since, it has proved a hard blueprint to follow, but Armagh and Wexford are entitled to accentuate the positive as the football season heads for Broadway.