New NFL.com website review

It's finally here! And what a refreshing sight it has been. The all new NFL.com website has been unleashed and it is a huge upgrade. The NFL decided to bring the NFL website in-house this year, as opposed to letting CBS Sportsline run it, and it hasn't disappointed. And it looks and feels great!

At first sight, it looks very, very clean. Gone are the "Powered by CBSSportsline" logos. Gone are the busy dark colors. Gone are the distractions. The new website looks very professional and looks like the staff has dedicated a lot of time and energy into putting this thing together. Clean and lean is the new theme.

When we were envisioning what the new NFL website should do, we thought of video on demand. VOD is the new buzzword. ABC.com allows you to go to their website, and watch all of their shows, with few advertisements. Missed Lost? Missed Big Brother? Missed your favorite NFL team? You can go online and watch. We were praying that the NFL.com website would do this, and now it does. They have a huge video gallery with highlights of all the games.

Our hope is that in the future, they will allow you to download entire games in HD to watch on your computer, similarly to how Netflix now allows VOD HD downloads. This is the future of video distribution. More and more people need to jump on this bandwagon early. Go to the NFL.com website now and take a peek under their video section for some of what's to come.

On a similar note, people who have DirectTV Sunday NFL Ticket with Superfan can now login to their DirecTV accounts online and watch any game from anywhere. That is simply amazing! And a welcome upgrade to the NFL world. Hopefully, NFL.com will emulate this and surpass it.

The team pages also look great. Very clean and very wide. You can view team statistics, photos, video highlights, video press conferences, and all sort of other information. Transaction news, schedules, depth charts, and much more. We like the way these new team pages look.

The statistics section has been revamped, but still looks about the same as the older version. Same old look and feel, same way of accessing the statistics. We like Yahoo's statistics layout and navigation better. They need to work on this. Yahoo.

The fantasy pages look amazing and offer tons of information. They look eerily similar to Yahoo's fantasy section. Lots of articles, cheatsheets, and rankings. They don't spend as much as Yahoo, nor seem to have the same level of expertise, but have at least recognized the influence of fantasy on our sport.

The new gamecenter looks and works a lot better than before as well. Go on the website and watch this thing go. It is wider, cleaner and more professional than the previous version. It's a thing of beauty. Choc full of live drives, photos, video highlights, and more information than you could imagine. This is a serious upgrade and probably one of the internet's top implementations of game tracking we've seen thus far. The animations are simply amazing!

The overall navigation is simple and easy to use. You can navigate to any part of the website from any part of the website. We really enjoy this. It was also easy to adjust to the new NFL.com because they retained a lot of the same layout and same menu bars. We like the new width and cleaner feel to the website. Did we mention the cleaner look?

The new NFL.com is a serious and much needed upgrade that NFL fans worldwide should welcome.