Cross-Sport Power Rankings

People love ranking stuff.  I'm not sure why, but there's something about seeing a list of nouns scored on a completely arbitrary scale that drive people nuts.  David Letterman has made a career out of his "Top Ten" lists.  U.S. News & World Report has become better known for its annual college and graduate school rankings than for its legitimate news coverage.  For the media covering professional athletics, essentially every sports website has its own set of Power Rankings for every sport.  Even though all sports leagues have a playoff system specifically designed to tell us who the best team is, websites like ESPN.com feel the need to proclaim the Tampa Bays Rays baseball's best team through twenty-five games.  ESPN's Power Rankings have become so popular, in fact, that a "Rankings" button now appears in the menu bar on the top of each sport's homepage, alongside seemingly more important topics such as "Scores," "Schedules" and "Standings."

Starting this summer, though, ESPN has taken the rankings phenomenon one giant step further with it's Cross-Sport Power Rankings, which is now in it's second week.  Here's the mission of the new weekly feature, according to ESPN:

Twenty spots. Each week we have only 20 spots to fill with the most intriguing, exciting and "on fire" players across all sports. Sounds fairly easy, right? Well, not exactly. Remember, we're not just ranking the best NBA players or the top MLB players. We're ranking the top 20 athletes in all of sports. And we're basing where they stand on their performance right now . . . That means surging athletes from the NHL, NBA, MLB, PGA, NASCAR, tennis, boxing, soccer, etc., must all be thrown into the discussion. And they all were, along with a few wild cards.

Now, let's put aside the fact that traditional Power Rankings columns, even those that only focus on one sport, are pointless.  At least those columns are dealing with things that are, on some level, directly comparable.  It's fairly obvious that there's no good way to compare athletes from different sports, nor does ESPN's new feature make any attempt to explain what the athletes will be ranked on, short of the line referring to "where [the athletes] stand on their performance right now."  We'll just have to acknowledge that these rankings are not based on any mathematical formula (think John Hollinger's PER rating system) and move on.

Because these ESPN cross-sport rankings are based on absolutely nothing it should be fairly hard to call them "wrong," but a quick glance at the second week's results leaves me scratching my head in disbelief.  Though he wasn't ranked at all in Week One, Tiger Woods climbed to number fifteen in the rankings after failing to make the cut at Quail hollow last weekend because "the panel still thinks Tiger has what it takes when it counts."  So much for basing the rankings on current performance.  The number one slot is held, for the second straight week, by LeBron James, even though the King was coming off a disappointing performance in a Game Two loss to Boston.  Why?  Because LBJ "won his second straight MVP" for a regular season that concluded weeks ago.  At the same time, Kobe Bryant came in at number four after leading the Lakers to a 2-0 series lead versus Utah.  Somehow George Hill (George Hill!) comes in one spot ahead of Deron Williams, and Roy Halladay is ranked six slots ahead of Ubaldo Jimenez even though Jimenez, not Halladay, was named NL Pitcher of the Month for April (as ESPN notes, "0.87 ERA, 6-0, 44 K's, one no-hitter").

A quick suggestion for ESPN.com: If you're going to introduce a pointless set of cross-sport rankings based only on current performance, at least do a good job with the relative rankings on players in the same sport.  While it might be hard to argue with Floyd Mayweather Jr. (for some reason) being ahead of Jaroslav Halak, at least get your George Hill vs. Deron Williams and Roy Halladay vs. Ubaldo Jimenez straight.  I should boycott these lists altogether but, like every other sports fan, the pull of another arbitrary list is just too strong.