What ESPN’s ‘NFLRank’ really says about the best players in football | Golf News and Tour Information [Video]

On Tuesday, ESPN released their annual ‘NFLRank’, a clicky, sticky SEO windfall that seeks to determine the 100 best football players on earth via an expert 53-person committee. The idea, as ESPN explains it at least, is to predict 2017’s top performers based not on past accomplishments or positional value, but instead by pure, simple “greatness.” How that greatness is measured, exactly, is something of a mystery. Is it an advanced algorithm like Total QBR? Is it a bunch of people sitting around eating ice cream and throwing darts like the CFP? ESPN is coy about its methodology, but perhaps we’re asking the wrong question anyway.

What’s fascinating about the upper-echelon of this list is not necessarily the individual players, whose every follicle we will examine and re-examine over the course the next four months, but what the makeup of those players say about the league as whole. To that …