PFCritics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pro Football Critics, also known as PFCritics or PFC, is located at http://www.pfcritics.com/. PFCritics provides news related to American Football throughout the year.
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[edit] History
PFCritics was founded in 2003 by Chris Pokorny. The website started as a small, editorial-based website regarding general issues in the National Football League (NFL). The only other features on PFC at the time were weekly power rankings, games of the week, and players of the week. As the website began to garner more attention, the site was re-formatted before the 2004 NFL season. Instead of providing editorials, PFC began to cover daily news as well. The features expanded into PSD graphical cutouts of NFL players, a miniature arcade, and a user-based prediction contest. This led to increased popularity of PFC after being featured on several ESPN Radio affiliates.
Heading into the 2005 season, PFC changed the overall layout of the site, while adding several new features yet again. The PFC Topsites was established, as well as exclusive draft coverage after the season ended. PFC was accepted into Google News as a reliable provider of NFL news, and can be found next to sources such as the New York Times. After the 2006 draft ended in April, PFC opened interactive fan message boards. The site is still in operation today.
[edit] Media Attention
[edit] Google News
Google News is an automated news aggregator provided by Google Inc. The Google News website was introduced as a beta release in April 2002. The service came out of beta on 23 January 2006.The service is human-edited, only allowing sources that provide reliable, uniquely generated content into their database. Most of the sources are either mainstream sources, such as ESPN, or newspapers from around the world. PFC is one of the few websites that has earned the credibility of being included into Google News, without being a mainstream company.
[edit] ESPN Radio
ESPN Radio currently has five company-owned stations in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and Pittsburgh. Most other markets have ESPN Radio affiliates, whether they be part-time or have their entire format dedicated to ESPN Radio. PFC has been featured on ESPN radio affiliates several times, featuring interviews regarding Super Bowl contenders. Unfortunately, transcripts have not been made available at this time.
[edit] Site Features
[edit] PFC Topsites
In search of a database of popular NFL-related websites, PFC created its own in July of 2005. It is now the leading NFL-exclusive topsites database on the Internet, and allows users to comment on the credibility of the site.
[edit] Power Rankings
As one of the early features of PFC, the power rankings are produced weekly in the regular season. During the offseason, there are only two power rankings produced. Power rankings list all 32 teams according to how the writer feels they rank after combining their ability to win and the current momentum they have established.
[edit] Players of the Week
This feature started in 2003, but lasted for only two seasons. In 2005, the section was no longer needed, because the content was switched into a weekly recap of the games that occurred in the NFL.
[edit] Interactive Message Boards
PFC finally established message boards in 2006 for fans to communicate their thoughts regarding issues in the NFL. The forums are still relatively new, and have not become a main-stream feature of the site yet.
[edit] PFC Pick'em
Founded in 2004, this contest allows fans to choose who they feel will win each game throughout the course of an NFL season. Whoever has the most amount of wins at the end of the season is declared the "PFC Pick'em Champion". In the 2004-2005 season, the winner of the contest was Ian Spence. In the 2005-2006 season, the winner of the contest was JJ Zachariason. Although JJ won the contest, the contest was extended into the playoffs due to a tie during the regular season. The 2006-2007 season contest was won by the previous season's runner-up, Darren Chen (aka. artanisxvi), who also won the site's first Survivor contest.
