BRISTOL, CT--An ESPN.com sportswriter was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder recently after confessing to an insatiable need to rank anything and everything. The writer, Jeff Merron, reportedly had a nervous breakdown last week after spending five hours trying to compile a Top 10 list of his greatest pairs of pants. He was granted a leave of absence by ESPN.

“I though I was going crazy,” Merron said from his room at the Bristol Hospital psychiatric ward. “Everywhere I went I would rank things I came across. At first it was fun to rank great ballplayers or notable games for my column. But then it started to seep into everything I did. I really started to unravel last month when I took to compiling extensive rankings of every car I saw on my way to work. I got into six accidents.”

Merron began compiling Top 10 lists at the behest of his ESPN.com editors. The media’s increasing desire to place every play, player, and game into historical context has reached a fever pitch, and the demand on sportswriters has never been greater.

Said ESPN editor Jim Lemoine: “People need to have things ranked in numerical order. It’s a national obsession. We can’t afford to have even the smallest statistic go unranked or unlisted. We must put every single random occurrence into some kind of neat, orderly package for people to digest. Then we must attach meaning or context to it so it seems more important than it is. Sadly this can be extremely trying for our writers. Jeff’s case is an extreme one. In fact, I’d say he is probably one of the Top 3 mentally damaged sportswriters of his generation—and that’s saying a lot.”

Lemoine said the need for listing things coincided with the rise of the internet and the national sports media.

“Prior to the dawn of the internet, there were thousands and thousands of facts, figures, and players that were tragically unranked,” he said. “Nobody had any idea who the biggest Super Bowl goat of all time was or which NBA players had the craziest hair, or which left-handed, Latino catchers were the best at blocking wild pitches during day games. As scary as it sounds, all that information was just floating around out there, untethered, with nobody to organize it. I don’t know how sports fans survived back then. We should all just be thankful that we live in the new, golden age of sports trivia categorization.”

Merron’s colleagues were not surprised by his mental breakdown. In fact, studies show that most modern sportswriters have suffered some level of burnout resulting from constant ranking.

Jim Caple, senior writer for ESPN.com, sympathized with Merron and called for an ease on ranking and list making.

“This is a wake-up call for all of us,” Caple said. “Any sportswriter out there who thinks it can’t happen to them is in denial. I personally spend half my day maniacally labeling and categorizing things that really don’t need to be labeled or categorized. It’s really just a waste of time. Incessant ranking is probably the #1 problem facing sportswriters today, ahead of 2) obesity, and 3) body odor.”

Since Merron’s breakdown, several other journalists have stepped forward to detail their own battles with chronic-ranking.

“Oh I know exactly how he feels, man,” said one veteran writer, who asked not to be identified. “That can be a real problem and cross over into other areas of your life. It can really take over. In the old days you just wrote articles. There was never anything like this. Now my editor is always telling me to make Top 10 lists, or name the all-time great NBA scandals, or ponder the most surprising one-season turnarounds in NFL history. It can become so habit forming. The other day I actually ranked my grandchildren from cutest to ugliest. Man, were they mad…well, some of them were. Others were extremely happy.”

So what’s the solution to this growing problem? Nobody knows for sure. The fact is, the number of sportswriters in America is increasing daily and there are only so many legitimate stories to go around. This imbalance creates the need for “filler,” or content published for the sole purpose of taking up space.

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