In honor of one of them going down for the year this past week, this week’s Top 7 looks at the biggest franchise players in sports. Here’s a very loose definition: if you took the player off of the team, they become horrible, and almost unwatchable. You would have nearly no interest in their games even if you were a fan of the team, and absolutely zero if you are a casual fan or simply that sport’s fan. Obviously, the all-time franchise player is Michael Jordan, but these are just current franchise players.


7. Albert Pujols
Really diehard Cardinal fans will say that they could never stop watching their team, but it’s easy to forget years like 1995 when they have had success more or less for nearly ten years. But when Albert Pujols is on the DL or taking a day off, you realize how much he means to the team. Having Skip Schumaker, Aaron Miles, and Cesar Izturis in your daily lineup is much easier to overlook when Pujols is in there too. And just to follow up on last week’s list, he is still the National League MVP. Now you hear people talk about CC Sabathia or Manny Ramirez being involved in the discussion, but that’s just proof that there is no real low to the level of people’s stupidity.


6. Tom Brady
Here’s a question for Patriots fans—do you REALLY want the Pats to continue to do well this year? Doesn’t Brady’s legacy mean more than that? Let’s say that they go 13-3 and make the SuperBowl. Do you really want to hear people saying that it may be “more the system than it is Tom Brady?” It would be like hearing about how the titles were tainted because of the spying controversy, only much worse. Just wondering.


5.Peyton Manning
Anyone who had anything at all on last year’s Week 17 Colts/Titans game knows how much Manning means to the Colts. They looked like a team barely able to compete in the local flag football finals. Even if he is only 60% like he was this past week, it’s still better than Jim Sorgi or anything else that they would throw out there.


4.Kobe Bryant
If you took Kobe off of the Lakers, they become the Grizzlies, especially since there are no lakes in L.A. and no bears in Memphis. The seats at home games would stay empty the entire game instead of until halfway through the second quarter. It would be like Wendy’s getting rid of the spicy chicken combo. Sure, the fries are still a little tasty, and they know how to carbonate a beverage, but it’s nowhere close to the same.


3.LeBron James
Lance Alfred, Daniel Gibson, J.J. Hickson, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Darnell Jackson, Tarence Kinsley, Sasha Pavlovic, Eric Snow, Wally Szczerbiak, Billy Thomas, Anderson Varejao, Ben Wallace, Delonte West, Mo Williams, Lorenzen Wright. These are the other players on LeBron James’s team. Yes, he is a franchise. It’s like that old-school Bulls “six-pack” shirt that had five Michael Jordan's and a Bulls fan on it. They should bring those six-pack shirts back, those were awesome.


2.Tiger Woods
Television ratings don’t lie (at least, I don’t think that they do). When Tiger Woods is in the finals of a major, ratings skyrocket. If he isn’t involved, even the announcers have a hard time getting up for what is going on. Why else would they still show his final round even if he’s down by 27 strokes? Until Tiger comes back, golf returns to its mid-1990s level of interest in casual sports fans, which is extremely close to zero.


1. The United States
This one is for the Olympics. If the U.S. is not involved in the event (or ok, fine, an extremely fast Jamaican trained in the United States), “Race to the White House 2016” on C-Span gets higher ratings. An example—you turn on swimming, you look for the flags at the start of the race next to their names. If you don’t see the stars and stripes, you look for a Full House re-run. Did you ever turn on midday coverage this past summer and it was something like Greece versus Italy in water polo? You probably asked “what the f is this?” and turned it off immediately. It must be tough to live in a country that only gets five medals in an entire Olympics. I wonder what they watch.