The NFL’s Good Call in Changing its Website
Modern culture is run by numbers. Numbers account for our followers Instagram, the dollars in our bank accounts, and the number of views on big games such as this past weekend’s Super Bowl. About 111.9 million people tuned into the Super Bowl this year, making it the third most watched U.S. television program of all time. Many of my friends tuned into the Super Bowl this past Sunday night and while tuned in many of them were online on the NFL’s website. My friend Sam shot me a text during the game telling me to check out a link on the NFL’s website. But by the time I got there, the link was nowhere to be found.
Not finding this link surely did not surprise me, because I knew that like all corporations the NFL would indeed update its website periodically especially during such a high profile game as the 50th Super Bowl. But this did make me curious enough to do some research and unfortunately researching the web is limited to knowing its chronological history and using a source from the Internet Archive called the Wayback Machine that allows you to see limited snapshots of many websites.
I began clicking on snapshots of the NFL’s website from Sunday the 7th (Super Bowl day) up until today. I began to lose interest in my research of the NFL’s Super Bowl transformation because there was very little transition to note other than difference in links and articles.
This first screenshot was taken at (18:29:42) or 6:29 pm according to the Wayback Machine.
This screen shot was taken approximately 18 seconds before the anticipated kickoff of the big game and included several articles about team odds of winning, a reflection of the past forty nine Super Bowl games, and an article discussing the Carolina Panther’s dabbing in a team photo.
This second screenshot was taken at (15:07:47) or 3:07 pm on February 10, 2016, 3 days after the Super Bowl.
I was at ends because I did not understand how such an important cultural sporting event did not have a larger impact on web and especially the NFL’s website in particular. But before I ended my research of the NFL’s website I was drawn to see what it looked like in my current time, which was precisely at (17:17) or 5:17 pm central time. I was not disappointed in what I found which is represented in this next photo which I personally screenshotted and therefore cannot be found on the Wayback Machine.
Somewhere within the two hours between the Internet Archive’s last screenshot and my visit to the NFL’s website there had been major structural and content change. Not only did the NFL properly dedicate the homepage to the Denver Broncos, the winning team this year’s Super Bowl, but the NFL added linked icons at the top of the page that upon clicked on would lead someone to the official page of the team of his or her choosing. This change, I had thought would have occurred more rapidly. Rather than being changed the night of the game or even the day after there was no real transformation until a full three days after the big event. This is possibly because the website was altered so extremely, they changed the website all at once because like most great things coding cannot be rushed.
Modern culture is run by numbers. Over 1 billion websites exist. More than 2 billion people use the Internet daily. Yet we have no idea how many times websites are changed and to the extent to which they were changed. It is important to be able to study the web in a more efficient manner than the Internet Archive has enabled us to because as people continually change the web, the web continually changes us.
