Of all the major American sports, football is probably the most difficult beat for a sportswriter to tackle. Team rosters are substantially larger than they are in other sports, coaches can be notoriously cagey, coaching staffs guard information as if they’re countries guarding national security secrets, and the salary cap is so complex that one virtually needs a Ph.D. in mathematics to make sense of it. Combined with needing to master the various machinations of roster move strategies (raise your hand if you know what it means when a team places the “transition tag” on a player), practice squad transactions, and the implications of “dead money” cap hits on teams’ free agency plans, covering the NFL may be as difficult of a challenge as there is in any area of journalism. 

All of this serves to make good and accurate reporting on the NFL that much more impressive — and top NFL reporters that much more valuable to their news organizations. For the past three decades, no one did it better, and no one was more valuable to his employer, than Chris Mortensen.