Rahul Sharma (Editor)

Profootballtalk.com

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Genre
  
Sports talk

Language(s)
  
English

Country
  
United States

TV adaptations
  
NBCSN

Running time
  
3 hours (6:00 – 9:00 a.m. ET)

Home station
  
NBC Sports Radio (2007-present)

Profootballtalk.com (PFT) is a news and rumor website that focuses on the National Football League. Though much of the information on PFT is aggregated from mainstream media sources, site editor Mike Florio often writes stories based on tips he attributes to a network of sources.

Contents

The main focus of the site is the "Daily Rumor Mill" consisting of postings of the aforementioned news items as well as editorializing by Florio. Throughout the season, weekly rankings of players at various positions for fantasy football are posted. Furthermore, the site maintains a year-round "Turd Watch" competition, in which teams are ranked based on the arrests of their personnel.

The site was created on November 1, 2001, by Florio, who is also the site's primary editor and contributor. Florio is responsible for the multiple daily updates to the primary page of the site, the "Daily Rumor Mill." In addition, content such as satirical photo-illustrations and periodic live blogs by Florio of NFL games or the draft.

On June 14, 2009, it was announced that Profootballtalk.com would become an affiliate of NBC Sports, which would hold exclusive rights to PFT content although Florio would retain ownership.

PFT staff

Former contributing writers include Tom Curran and Aaron Wilson.

Site sections / elements

  • Rumor Mill – The main aspect of the site. Multiple articles are posted every day on all sorts of NFL related information.
  • Fantasy Mill – Embedded content from Rotoworld.com concerning NFL Fantasy information.
  • Teams – Contains links to individual team websites (official and unofficial), message boards and updated daily news links.
  • Draft – Draft order list and trade value charts.
  • Power Rankings – Ranking the 32 NFL Franchises, commenting on each as they're ranked.
  • All-Turd teams – Annual 'All-turd' teams and 'Hall of Turds' inductions, which feature lists of players that Florio asserts are the worst "characters" of the NFL.
  • PFT Gear – External link to merchandise available for purchase.
  • Events – Listing of radio appearances.
  • Media – Links to audio and video content supplemental to the main site content. Also contains link to sister site CollegeFootballTalk.com
  • Turd Watch – Tracking the arrests of every member of NFL organizations and assigned points in a ranking system until 2009
  • Live Blogs – Florio holds live chats with fans during NFL events, such as games, the draft and Brett Favre retirement press conferences

    • Former

  • Pic of the Day – Contained satirical pictures (often photoshopped) made by Taco Bill.
  • Podcasts
  • Interviews – Interviews with Matt Birk, Antonio Bryant, Ben Leber, and Steve McKinney
  • PFT Chronicles – a cartoon series about ProFootballTalk put together by "Tech Guy Sean"
  • Agent Talk – a column written by Ron Del Ducca
  • Media Mutterings – a column written by Gene Amadao
  • Dante's Draft Links – a person claiming to be medieval poet Dante Alighieri ranked (made fun of) NFL draft websites
  • The Simple Truth – A column by Fox Sports's Jason Smith
  • The Dirty Dozen' – Florio's list of the 12 worst NFL franchise

    • Notable errors

    ProFootballTalk posted and thus spread the unconfirmed rumor on January 25, 2007 that broadcaster and former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw had died in a car accident. This proved to be incorrect.

    A similar instance occurred on the September 14, 2009 when the crew of Profootballtalk.com erroneously reported a quote from Keyshawn Johnson in referring to Joe Flacco as a "bum". A correction to this was posted on the September 15.

    Censorship complaints

    The site has received numerous complaints from users regarding censorship of discussion forums. In an article that appeared on the site, called "Seeking comments on whether we should dump comments", the words "delete" or "deleted" appeared 88 times, in reference to the site's practice of deleting user comments to articles. The words "remove" or "removed" appear 22 times. The article itself references the process of "clearing" comments in the quote below -

    "In turn, the process of clearing comments has become a headache, with plenty of comments not adding to the conversation and plenty of inappropriate comments slipping through the cracks and plenty of readers sending in emails to complain about their own comments being dumped."

    According to user complaints in the discussion thread of the article containing the quote above, the criteria for deleting comments is not clear, with many users complaining that their deleted posts were not inappropriate or off-topic. Several users' complaints of deleted comments cite conflicting opinion with the author as the suspected reason for removal.

    References

    Profootballtalk.com Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA