List FAIL: ESPN's Aaron Schatz

Jason King is not the only writer from the traditional media (or the new media) who is cobbling together stupid lists during the long off season of football and basketball. Guess the summer months when everyone is bored out of their minds (baseball doesn't cut it for everyone) writers are under pressure to produce content which results in laughable lists penning Just$C* as a "tradition rich" hoops program. Thankfully for Jason as mentioned at the beginning he is not the only one coming up with joke lists this summer.

WWL's Aaron Schatz tried to come up with a list of "25 most over-rated" players in the NFL from this past decade. Here is how the list went from 10 to 9 (which is posted in an Atlanta Falcons message board):

10. DeAngelo Hall
9. Dante Hall
8. Stephen Alexander
7. Ty Law
6. Reggie Bush
5. Adam Vinatieri
4. Jamal Lewis
3. Chris Chambers
2. Michael Vick

And the number 1 guy in Aaron's "list". A familiar name for all of us:

1. DeShaun Foster: Foster is the platonic ideal of a boom-and-bust running back, who breaks one or two highlight runs a game and then spends the rest of the time leaving his unfortunate quarterback in second-and-9 after second-and-9. Once a year he had a huge game against the Atlanta Falcons, and convince everybody he was a good NFL starter for another 12 months. According to Football Outsiders numbers, he was below replacement level in four out of six seasons. He only managed 4.3 yards per carry (average for running backs) in two seasons, and had no year with more than three rushing touchdowns. In 2007, Foster (3.5 yards per carry) had 100 more carries than DeAngelo Williams (5.0 yards per carry). Good luck explaining that one.

Huh? Riddle me this. How can Foster be the most over-rated player in the NFL from last 10 years considering he was not a top-10 pick? Wait a minute. He was not even a top-20 pick. Oh wait. What's that? Apparently he wasn't drafted in the entire first round. Foster if you can remember was drafted in the second round, after his college career ended abruptly over allegations over driving an SUV. Not only that he also had to battle through a number of injuries. Still he did what he could and considering where he was drafted did pretty well with the Carolina Panthers.

Meanwhile, somehow Reggie Bush is well bellow Foster. Unlike Foster, Bush never had to suffer the consequences of alleged extra benefits (in Bush's cases it involved hundreds of thousands of dollars (alleged) extra benefits going to his family members which would be illegal under NCAA rules), and rode into NBA with LeBron James like hype without producing anything close to match it.

Of course, the names glaringly missing from that list include players such as Alex Smith (I say that as a Niners fan), Tim Couch, Akili Smith, Joey Harrington, Matt Leinart, and to be fair Cade McNown (my favorite Bruin QB of all time).

So the question before publishing this kind of garbage list on a major national network such as ESPN, does it go through some kind of editorial process exercising common sense knowledge? I get it. It's a slow time. So one of the main reasons to write up list pieces like this is to kick up some dirt and get a conversation going. But does that really mean people can get away with writing something that is so dumb?

GO BRUINS.