Press Row

Nothing like going away for a few days and having everything happen, right? Hope everyone enjoyed the news-filled weekend.

Rather than simply try to catch up on all the fine journalism it appears I missed (I hear Timberlake was OK at the ESPY’s?), I’m going to take this chance to unveil a fun little feature that we’ll be keeping track of here during the football season: tracking the weekly power rankings across the media.

What’s one of the biggest ways for a journalist to gain credibility? To see their opinion or prediction come to fruition—to seem that much closer to an expert, that their viewpoint becomes so valued.

One of the annual NFL training camp exercises for most major media outlets is the release of their opening league power rankings. It’s really amazing to watch how these fluctuate over the course of a season—ie, how utterly wrong so many of the “experts” can be.

So, one of the fun projects we’ll take on here at Press Row is to keep track of each major media outlet’s power rankings, average them up, and see who, at the end of the season, comes out the closest to the final power rankings.

Now, we’ll have a better idea of who, truly, the experts are. We already have ESPN’s and FOX’s, and we know PFT has subscribed to the Chinese water torture version of release. Any other rankings out there we haven’t seen yet? (Including print media!)