The Fantasy Football Federation held a Summit on Tuesday evening, calling in experts from around the country to try and consolidate a master ranking list of wide receivers for the 2014-2015 season. Held in Philadelphia, the Summit featured experts ranging from ESPN.com writers to Fox Sports analysts. They were asked to rank wide receivers alphabetically, but after an eight and a half hour conference they were unable to produce a list that they all agreed on.
Each year, sports websites and fantasy blogs produce list after list of rankings and projections for players around the league and these lists often vary. In an attempt to rank NFL wide receivers in alphabetical order, the experts not only couldn’t agree but they almost came to blows.
Adam Schefter, NFL Insider for ESPN, was in disbelief that some of his colleagues had Antonio Brown as their top WR on the alphabetical charts when Keenan Allen clearly comes before him.
“Keenan Allen had a great rookie year for the Chargers and surpassed expectations for a guy just breaking into the league,” argued Schefter. “Besides, ‘A’ comes before ‘B’ in the alphabet. So there’s that.”
The members of the conference were given a coffee break at 9:30 that morning, but not before arguing over the legitimacy of the Merriam-Webster dictionary and whether or not Dave Richard, Senior Fantasy Writer for CBS Sports, had the most updated version.
Richard, citing the “I” before “E” rule, insisted that Patriot’s WR Julian Edelman was ranked too high by the other members of the Summit.
“‘I’ before ‘E’,
except after ‘C’,” said a frustrated Richard. “I learned that rule in first
grade and it’s served me well over the years. Now they want to change the
rules? I don’t think so.”
Matthew Berry,
Senior Director of Fantasy Sports at ESPN and aptly nicknamed “The Talented Mr.
Roto,” was the moderator for the conference and had the final say on all
matters. When some of the experts put forth a motion to rank players by their first names and not their last names, he quietly put it to rest,
calling it “literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
One of the more
outspoken gentlemen at the conference was SportsCenter host Stephen A. Smith,
who wasn’t actually invited to the event and sources say that they’re probably
going to fire the security guard who let him in.
“From my perspective,
you can make the case that every football player is a ‘running back’, said
Smith as he actually made the quotation marks with his fingers. “These are
athletes who have spent countless hours perfecting their craft. Are you going
to tell Michael Vick that he doesn’t ‘run’?”
Schefter and
Brandon Funston of Yahoo! Sports got in a heated argument about how Green Bay’s
Randall Cobb spells his last name, while Stephen A. Smith was not willing to
budge on his belief that there was a silent “G” in Cobb’s name.
“Take Demaryius Thomas, for example,” said Funston as he stepped to the whiteboard with a dry-erase marker in one hand and a bear claw in the other. Funston began drawing x’s and o’s on the board and highlighted for the others that Thomas is a deep threat for an electric Denver offense and is one of Peyton Manning’s main targets. “Sometimes ‘Y’ can be used as a vowel, too,” Funston added.
CSNNE’s Tom E.
Curran, who covers the Patriots, pulled out a Spanish-Mandarin translator to
support his argument, but not before Dave Richard surprised them all by
announcing to the group that he had AJ Bleach Roosemelt as his top receiver
this year, who nobody else had ever heard of.
Sources say they
got a lunch delivery from Tomasi’s, but Schefter didn’t like his chicken parmesan
Panini and he could have sworn there were only 25 letters in the alphabet. “Who
knew?”
The Federation is
expected to welcome back the experts next week, where they will be asked to rank
quarterbacks based solely on how many touchdown passes they threw last season.
Calculators will be provided.
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