There are nearly 1,700 players on the active rosters of the 32 NFL teams. Over the past few weeks, however, the majority of trending topics regarding the NFL focused on a few whose serious actions were, unfortunately, reflective of dire situations beyond football and sports.

There's little doubt that we live in an era that's all about Big Data. Everything from businesses to politicians-even online dating sites-heavily rely on stats and number crunching to determine not only effectiveness and efficiency, but also to suss out whether or not something (or someone) is a winner. Perhaps no other business is as invested in winning and winners as professional sports, so it stands to reason that stats-obsessed sports franchises are increasingly using Big Data to get ahead of the game-and to win.

From a purely observational context, it strikes me that we're at an interesting cross-roads in generational marketing. So much of what our sports fan and participant research focused on during the first decade of this century was meeting the needs of a maturing Boomer generation that did not always follow the leads of prior generations reaching a similar life stage. Fast-forward to the present day and it seems that everyone is trying to unlock the secret sauce that resonates with Millennials. And on the surface level this makes sense.

The 2014 NFL season officially begins this week with a Thursday night broadcast on NBC - the Sunday Night Football network. However, after that on Thursday nights other networks will take over - first CBS and then the NFL Network. This has become one of the more interesting offseason moves, at least on the media-side, that is, the look of NFL Thursday night football this season.