The National Football League wants to consume your every waking thought. It wants you to be invested in the largest professional American football league in the world every minute of every day or every year.<\/p>\n
The second the regular season is over, they want you to focus on coaching and general manager changes. Then free agency shows up in March. The NFL Draft is in April just when free agency slows down. They\u2019ll give you a couple weeks to ravenously consume all the post-draft reaction content you can muster and then they\u2019ll release the schedule in May. Training camps will start in July and that will keep the constant content train a\u2019movin\u2019.<\/p>\n
But what about June? Mandatory minicamps aren\u2019t long enough to really hold people\u2019s attention for a meaningful amount of time. How does the NFL keep people constantly engaged in their product?<\/p>\n
They launch the NFL Top 100 Players, which is a ranking of the league\u2019s best from the lens of the players themselves. Every week, there\u2019ll be reactions on social media from all 32 fan bases and all associated analysts dissecting what the countdown says, who\u2019s too high and who\u2019s too low. They can milk this weekly drip-feed of information all through the dogs days of summer right up to the start of the NFL regular season, serving a dual purpose of filling a gap in the NFL annual schedule while simultaneously giving training camp and preseason a little extra boost of background content.<\/p>\n
Players will be interviewed.
People will argue on the internet.
And all will be as intended.<\/p>\n
When viewed through that lens, the annual NFL Top 100 Players list makes complete sense. It\u2019s an entertainment product, its main function to drive engagement and discussion. But all too often, people use the NFL players\u2019 accumulating opinions as some form of data point in favor of their own views on a player; whether that person is good or bad, better than another player, or worse than another player.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people who are actually in the league think Bob is better than Jim; you think you know more than they do?\u201d<\/p>\n
There are many things wrong about this approach, but at the forefront of all conversations about the NFL\u2019s top 100 players, there must be this statement: The system is not designed for actual analysis.<\/p>\n
The way the NFL Top 100 list works is as such: the players are sent forms to fill out around Thanksgiving of every regular season. These forms ask for the player respondent to identify their top 20 players in the NFL and rank them. These top-20 lists are then submitted, at which point these votes are tallied and extrapolated to 100 players.<\/p>\n
Right away we have identified a few massive problems in this data collection:<\/p>\n
Even if active players were set up for success through the logistics of the Top 100 voting process, it\u2019s not as if NFL players, active or retired, have proven themselves to have opinions that are intrinsically better than an average football watcher. Networks may scoop up former NFL players for their charisma and ability to generate engagement, but there have been innumerable instances of current or former NFL players who have terrible football takes that make even the moderately informed fan cringe.<\/p>\n
The truth is, the NFL Top 100 Players list isn\u2019t even trying to be a valuable data point. It\u2019s trying to be entertainment. It\u2019s structured as such, it\u2019s marketed as such, and it\u2019s released as such. It simply needs to be consumed as such.<\/p>\n
…and that\u2019s the way the cookie crumbles. I\u2019m Bruce Nolan with Buffalo Rumblings. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @BruceExclusive<\/a> and look for new episodes of \u201cThe Bruce Exclusive\u201d every Thursday on the Rumblings Cast Network \u2014 see more in my LinkTree!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The National Football League wants to consume your every waking thought. It wants you to be invested in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2048],"tags":[215,214,53,4424,2086,7,6,320],"class_list":{"0":"post-337293","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-buffalo-bills","8":"tag-bills","9":"tag-buffalo","10":"tag-buffalo-bills","11":"tag-buffalo-bills-discussion","12":"tag-buffalobills","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-nfl","15":"tag-opinion"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115138135723457511","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}