Buffalo Rumblings
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.
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’ll give you a couple weeks to ravenously consume all the post-draft reaction content you can muster and then they’ll release the schedule in May. Training camps will start in July and that will keep the constant content train a’movin’.
But what about June? Mandatory minicamps aren’t long enough to really hold people’s attention for a meaningful amount of time. How does the NFL keep people constantly engaged in their product?
They launch the NFL Top 100 Players, which is a ranking of the league’s best from the lens of the players themselves. Every week, there’ll be reactions on social media from all 32 fan bases and all associated analysts dissecting what the countdown says, who’s too high and who’s 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.
Players will be interviewed.
People will argue on the internet.
And all will be as intended.
When viewed through that lens, the annual NFL Top 100 Players list makes complete sense. It’s an entertainment product, its main function to drive engagement and discussion. But all too often, people use the NFL players’ 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.
“The people who are actually in the league think Bob is better than Jim; you think you know more than they do?”
There are many things wrong about this approach, but at the forefront of all conversations about the NFL’s top 100 players, there must be this statement: The system is not designed for actual analysis.
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.
Right away we have identified a few massive problems in this data collection:
