The National Football League is relaunching its annual NFL Top 100 list as an original series on X, the Elon Musk-owned social platform. In past years, the series (which sees current NFL players vote on which of their peers they think are the best in the game) has run as a TV special on NFL Network.
The top 10 finale will still run on NFL Network Sept. 1, but beginning June 30 and continuing through Aug. 29, the NFL will debut two short-form episodes highlighting two players on the list every weekday, continuing over the course of the summer (the first player, #100, Chargers wide receiver Ladd McConkey, was revealed Monday morning).
According to Ross Ketover, senior executive for NFL Films, the series has “always been great content, but a big part of it has been sort of the partnership with the players and the engagement with the players.”
And many of the players, of course, are active on X (and other social platforms), so the league wanted to find a home and a new format for the series that allows for more sharing, more engagement, and, yes, more conversation.
“Part of our original strategy is working to build this new vertical at the nexus of entertainment and creator economy, and ideally work in the most commercial content categories on the platform,” says Mitchell Smith, had of original content at X. “When I was launching the original content vertical, I wanted to meet with the NFL Films folks and figure out, how do we extend and elevate that relationship around original programming?”
Smith says that X did a study that showed that a significant amount of the online conversation and debate around who the greatest athletes of all time (the GOATs) are happen on its platform, which informed the deal.
“So a format like this and an IP like this that fosters debate around who the greatest is felt like a really organic place to start,” he says. “We really look at things from a timing lens, and how does it play to the platform strengths, so that it’s not going to just foster viewership, but also engagement and interactivity, because we are an inherently social platform.”
“We’ve done a lot of content over the years on a lot of platforms, long-form storytelling, but as Mitch said, this is a lot more in the now, the show is so linked to the debate, we might as well be in a platform that also helps foster that same debate,” Ketover adds.
Smith frames the new version of NFL Top 100 as part and parcel with the platform’s push into creator-driven programming, a push that also includes original video podcasts hosted by Khloe Kardashian and Venus and Serena Williams.
“Everyone in this ecosystem is a creator, whether you’re the NFL or the Williams sisters or Khloe Kardashian, and we’re looking for creators who are super users of the platform, who are great at not only distributing great content, but also sparking conversation, and are inherently social,” Smith says. “In a great way, the NFL is one of the biggest super users of the platform. We’ve got such a great, longstanding relationship with real-time highlights and clips and NFL Films bringing such a high brow pedigree and brand to storytelling in that way.”
For the NFL and NFL Films, meanwhile, the deal with X for NFL Top 100 is an other example of bringing its content to the platforms where the league and its in-house studio think it will click.
NFL Films, which has become a powerhouse studio on its own terms, produces shows like Hard Knocks for HBO and Quarterback for Netflix, it produces shows for NFL Network, ESPN and Roku Channel. The key is fitting the right programming to the right platform.
“There used to be a thought of. ‘you bring viewers to platforms with shows,’ but we’re actually finding it’s the other way. Let’s deliver what people want on the platforms they’re on,” Ketover says. “And this is the kind of content I think fits perfectly with X. Our thought is, this will be the first, we have a couple things with Mitch we’re working on that will lean towards more of this immediate access-driven current player content on this on this platform.”
