On a very basic level, sports are played to find out who is better. We turn athletic skill into a measurable statistic known as points. Whoever has the better total of points wins the match. That entity, be it a team or an individual, is “better” than those it competes against.

Sports are no longer very basic. Our consumption of them has changed accordingly. We now have infinite access to sports of all kinds, infinite information on our favorite athletes and sports video games so realistic they make our parents squint. Sports don’t ever have to stop.

When I played Madden 2000 on my PC as a child, I was entranced by the ratings system for players. I obsessed over signing the best free agents and executing one-sided trades to get as many of my starting players to have an overall rating of 80 or above. I’d usually just set up my team and simulate the season, Super Bowl and all, to see how I did.

I mean, sure I could play and be good at the game and prove that I’m “better” in that way, but if I could assemble a team — essentially a list of numbers — that proved in a random, objective simulation that I had the best squad, I would have won the game, for my personal intents and purposes.

Madden came to define my perception of players, overtaking my previous defining obsession: football cards. Before I would scan statistics, see the player in action and maybe read a short bio on him. Now, it was simplified: a number, out of 100. Above 80 and you were a good player, below 80 and you were forgettable.

Soon, I had NBA and MLB games and knew who was good across the board — not that I had watched them play, heard from others who had or even played the video game as them. It was a player and a number. Comparisons took milliseconds. If two players had the same overall rating, more specific ratings — speed, accuracy, strength — were a few columns away.

Clearly, I wasn’t the only one whose opinions of players became inebriated by the simplicity of ratings. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who watched an interest turned into an obsession. Clearly, many others have let ratings reach a logical conclusion, rankings, and let those define their outlook on sports.

From the practical side of things, it’s necessary to rank teams by measured statistics. If you have a tournament, you use seeds to ensure it plays out fairly. If you have seeds, you need to have qualifying statistics — wins and losses — to determine those seeds. But a lot of rankings in sports are for convenience and fun, in an effort to make sports something bigger.

Rankings are a staple of college sports. They act as a viewer’s guide to aid expectations for certain teams because there are a lot of college athletics teams out there, and we don’t need to know all of them.

Rankings aren’t a statistic, they’re an ascribed measurement, subject to change — indicative in their nature of change. Last week, Illinois didn’t just beat Indiana, it beat No. 1-ranked Indiana; as in, the best college basketball team in the country.

Rankings are a product of the media, so distinguishing between Associated Press poll rankings and ESPN power rankings becomes difficult. Did you know ESPN’s college football website features four different media polls, the BCS rankings, its own power rankings and a poll-generated, fan-voted rankings? That’s seven different ranking systems. Only one of which is concretely based in statistics, and that’s the one America hates.

Bleacher Report is also a frequent butt of rankings jokes, as they are currently enlisted in tackling the NFL 1,000 project. Ranking that many players is absurd, no matter how much game film you’ve watched. What happened to the notion of “any given Sunday”? And the ranking of quarterbacks, left tackles and punters in the same list is impossibly perilous.

ESPN completed a similar project with the NBA in 2012, ranking the 500 best players.

The list was debated — an ESPN buzzword — because it was subjective in nature. It became a comparison of resumes, not even a simulation of who would win. All arguments stemming from these subjectively ascribed results — player rankings, power rankings and player ratings — do not matter, and they are not sports.

Sports fans need to wean themselves off the vice of rankings. While they may provide a guilty pleasure, they are merely theories born to be disproved. Real sports fans know that it’s the arena, and not a piece of paper, where it’s determined who is “better.”

Eliot is a junior in Media. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @EliotTweet.