NFL Network’s Top 100 Countdown should be taken with a grain of salt
Earlier this week, Oakland Raiders quarterback Derek Carr was voted 11 in the NFL’s Top 100 Countdown and although it’s nice to be recognized and receive as many accolades as possible, we have to remember that this show is nothing but a filler during the off-season and there are better ways to determine how good a player is.
Some weeks ago J.J. Watt of the Houston Texans called out the show and saying it was a joke when he realized he had been voted 35. He said he didn’t deserve to be part of the list as he had only played 3 games. Despite the fact that Watt is one of the best overall football players in the league now and if we are to use the show’s logic and only take the previous year into account, how was it that he was voted relatively high in spite of playing less than 75 percent of the season?
I played 3 games… this list is a joke. https://t.co/KnKDX1p816
— JJ Watt (@JJWatt) June 6, 2017
Similarly, Peyton Manning was the “fifty-best player” in 2012 even though he was not part of even a single down the year before. He was very important to the Colts and without him, his first team went 2-16 without him, but again, if we were supposed to use the show’s metric and only take into account the previous years instead of his  entire body of work (which is quite impressive), Manning should not have qualified for the Top 500, let alone being considered one of the best players after not playing in the 2011 season.
In 2015, something similar happened when Adrian Peterson got all the way to 62 in spite of just playing one game after he was suspended the previous season. Peterson will one day be in the NFL Hall of Fame, but in 2014, we talked about him not because of how great he was, but rather because of the switch he used to educate and teach his son a lesson (better known as beating to the rest of the world).
Basically, players are asked to vote for their top 20 players in the year they are casting a vote, the higher the player is on the list the most points the player gets; up to twenty points if they are voted number one and one point if they are voted twentieth. The players with the most points make the Top 100 list.
Moreover, Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk said, when pointing out that many players consider the list to be bogus, that “the problem is that the list gets promoted to the public as a definitive ranking of the players by the players when it’s definitely not. It’s an extremely unscientific poll that is slapped together on the fly, with no information ever released by the league regarding the number of players who submitted the top-20 ballots that become the top-100 list.”
Carr might be indeed the eleventh-best players in the league, but it is not because the NFL Network says it, the Top 100 is just there to fill a slot on TV and make fans argue about who is deserving or not. I rather just watch 13 Reasons Why.