Ok worthless is probably a little harsh. A more accurate description would be that they have little meaning to you. Why is that? I break it up into three things: intent of the ranker, intent of the reader, and accuracy of the ranker’s method. It is more likely than not you and the ranker are trying to put an image together with two different sets of puzzle pieces, or just the opposite, two different images with the same set of pieces.

A lot of rankings just don't quite stack up right. Photo by ninjapoodles
A lot of rankings just don’t quite stack up right.

The last time you looked at a ranked list of NFL teams, did you pause to think “What exactly is being ranked here?” Is it the best team? What does best team even mean? The team most likely to win the super bowl? To win the most games? Most popular? The problem is even if you did ask yourself that, it’s unlikely you were able to find a concrete answer. Even on the major sports networks it can be a little fuzzy. The most recent ESPN Power Rankings describe the No. 1 team as “the NFL’s strongest unit.” How is that for vague? Power polls are especially tricky. Often you will be able to look up how each person in the poll voted, only to find out that each person was ranking the teams with a different intent!

Knowing what you are trying to measure up makes a huge difference when browsing the plethora of rankings out there. I imagine people are frequently just looking to get a general idea of who the experts/public think is hot right now. If that is the case you won’t have much of a problem finding a ranking that matches your inquiry. If you have something much more specific in mind, try not to settle for half the picture. Don’t go looking for the most likely team to win the super bowl by looking at a ranking of rushing yards allowed.

In my last post, I invited people to join in on a debate of the greatest offense of the modern era. Myself and some others were going back and forth on the thread, when someone passed on a link to The Best NFL Offense of the last 30 years. Perfect! The blogger is pretty clear with both his intent and method, and it obviously matched up with our discussion well. The problem was that his method, although he did a thorough job, did not create a very accurate way of ranking offenses. After some thought I decided that he had ended up ranking the greatest fantasy football offense of the last thirty years, and had done a pretty good job of it. So even when you find rankings that match up with what you are looking for they might not be reliable. I have a posting of how I broke down his method and the other criteria posters were using to rank offenses against the one that Inside the Numbers uses. Looking at great offenses ->

Given the number of different rankings that exist out there it’s surprisingly hard to find an accurate list of teams that matches your intent. This might sound overly negative to you, but it has become a rank happy world of top ten and greatest ever lists. Neal Pollack touches on this in the first of his series on Top ten dumbest sports trends. Now I’m not saying quality rankings dont exist. Of course I’m very fond of the ranking and prediction method I helped ITN create, but as with most quality information it is not free to the public (unless you are looking for previous years rankings, which is free). Under the links for NFL Rankings on this blog you can find some sites that I think offer quality rankings or at least make their intent clear.

If you are willing to spend a little time and effort, an alternate but very good idea would be to create your own rankings! You shouldn’t have a problem with mixing up the intent of the ranker with that of the reader since you will be playing the role of both. Remember to stay focused on the goal of your rankings, and to avoid being redundant with which stats you include. Who knows, maybe next time I’ll be reading about your company’s NFL ranking system.

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