Category Archives: NFL Top 100

NFL Top 100

My NFL Top 100 Players of 2025:

As this year’s official NFL top 100 countdown is nearing a close – even though the network pushed back its release by nearly a month – I’m once again presenting my personal version as an alternative. Any content in this format has a certain level of subjectivity, but I believe in my process of putting the list together more so than how the top 20 lists for all the players polled are merged together.

Just as a reminder of what the criteria is supposed to be – a ranking of the best 100 players heading into 2025, regardless of position. Obviously, it’s challenging to not weigh the value of quarterbacks or adequately compare names with very different jobs/roles. However, the aim here to me always is to find the right balance between what someone provides for their specific team and also project how they would fare on a theoretical average franchise, without a defined scheme.

My one quick disclaimer here is that I didn’t include any players coming off long-term injuries, are dealing with pending suspensions or other factors that’ll affect their performance this upcoming season in significant fashion. That’s why the following names weren’t eligible – Christian McCaffrey, Tyreek Hill, Andrew Thomas, Sam Cosmi, Aidan Hutchinson, Alim McNeill, Christian Wilkins and Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah.

This is what I ended up with:

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NFL Top 100, Player Rankings

My NFL top 100 players of 2024:

It’s that time of the year again. Players across the NFL have voted for their peers and created a list of the top 100 among those – and so did I. As always, I have to mention the fundamental issue with how the official list is put together, considering each participant only lists their first 20 names, which encourages some biases for teammates. Players at the end of the ranking would otherwise not make the cut.

Once again, this list is about the 100 best players in the league, regardless of position, heading into 2024 – not judging their play last season exclusively but also not turning this into an actual projection exercise. Some of them are easier to measure and there is probably some inclination towards those who affect the game significantly through multiple avenues. However, you will only find 11 quarterbacks among these names. And specifically on that topic, I tried to isolate the player from the situation, which is why some MVP candidates may not have made their way onto the list, even if their numbers would suggest that they should be.

Please note that players like Aaron Rodgers, Kirk Cousins, Nick Chubb, Jaelan Phillips and Dre Greenlaw were not eligible in this discussion, considering we don’t fully know their availability and effectiveness for this upcoming season. I also didn’t feel comfortable ranking Cooper Kupp or Nick Bolton, who each played about half a season in 2023, but once again I’m not quite sure where they stand health-wise.

Here it is:

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NFL Top 100

Halil’s NFL Top 100 Players of 2023:

It’s that time of the year again! After going through the extensive exercise of ranking the top 20+ players at every single position in the NFL today, I combined those to create a list of the 100 best in the game heading into this upcoming season, regardless of position.

The player’s list is one of my favorite things to watch every year, but the process is inherently flawed, since the voters only fill in their top-20 names and are tempted to prop up their teammates or even list themselves. Some of the guys near the bottom shouldn’t be on anybody’s top-20 ballot if they’re being objective.

What’s important to understand is that I’m trying to isolate the individual players, rather than judging their value to their respective teams or how good they may be in a specific role. So not while I bring up general statistics, but also give you background on studying the game’s best and try to draw a bow between both those worlds with some advanced metrics, in order to add context.

Before we get to the actual list, here are a few players who I considered ineligible due to missing time with injury in the past or expected to not be available for a certain amount of games in 2023 – Kyler Murray, Matthew Stafford, Alvin Kamara, Calvin Ridley, Darren Waller, Harold Landry, J.C. Jackson and Micah Hyde.

Let’s dive in now:

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NFL Top 100

My top 100 NFL players of 2022:

It’s that time of the year again! How the NFL’s official “Top 100 Players of 2022” list is being revealed has been as unclear as ever, in terms of initial release date and the frequency of episodes. Yet, we do finally know it’s coming out this Sunday and so as I do every year, I wanted to provide my own version of the list.

As always, the process of putting this together is very challenging and unlike the inherently flawed system of presenting players their own list of top-20 to fill out, which invites bias for teammates and gives us players towards the end of the countdown that shouldn’t be up in that top-20 stratosphere for any person. It’s also rarely clarified that this is a ranking of players for the upcoming (2022) season, rather than a look back at what happened last year.

Either way, having to actually put this whole thing together and explain it all does leave you dissatisfied, because there are so many guys you want to get on there, but you have to just make that cut-off. Once again, this is not a question of player value and we’re working under the assumption that each player would be in a neutral situation, rather than taking the pieces around him into account. There will always be a projection factor, but generally I tried to judge where players are currently, based on evidence we already have on them.

Two parameters to consider here – the players actually have to be by all likelihood available for the full 2022 NFL season, which excludes DeAndre Hopkins and by all accounts Deshaun Watson due to suspension, along with a few other names, who are expected to not be available for the start of the season based on injury, such as Chris Godwin. And everybody must have played at least ten games across the past two seasons, which disqualifies guys like Christian McCaffrey, Michael Thomas, Ronnie Stanley,and I also grouped David Bakhtiari with them, since he’s closer to that ten-game mark than full health it appears.

Let’s dive into the list:

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NFL Top 100

My NFL Top 100 players of 2021:  

As I have done the last seven years and as the actual reason I started with my page, I have put together my personal list of the NFL’s Top 100. This was originally designed to be a ranking of the top 100 players in the league, regardless of position, for the upcoming season. And while this has more and more become a comparison of resumes and altered its criteria, in the spirit of what this was intended to be, I listed what I thought were the very best players, in relation to how good they are at their position coming into 2021. What I changed this year was actually putting ratings on these players – sort of Madden style – and one by one incorporating them into the list, while debating back and forth when multiple guys shared the same number.

There are six names to start off with, who didn’t qualify for my list. I believe they all deserve to be on it, but I just didn’t know where to put them, because of how long it’s been since we’ve seen them on the field, how often they’ve gotten hurt recently or because we just don’t know if/when we will see them play again.

I also added the 30 names that just missed the cut. So it’s almost a top 130, because I always have a tough time leaving those names off, but I feel pretty good about the ultimate rankings that I put together here.

For analysis, just click on the video, where I work my way from the bottom to the top!

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The official countdown premieres five days from now, but I’m filming this here on August 4th – just in case any players were to suffer an injury or some other news coming out, that would change the availability of certain players.

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NFL Top 100

NFL Top 100 Players of 2020:

Every year NFL Network puts out a list of the Top 100 Players for the upcoming season, as voted by their peers. I have talked about the flaws of that whole process a few times already – the players only write down their top 20 players, which is understandable, but also doesn’t result in the proper results, since everybody is somewhat to put their guys on; not all players actually get to watch a lot of games, if they don’t include teams they actually face or are limited to watching highlights; and the voting concludes before the playoff are even here, which can be the only somewhat logical reason, Patrick Mahomes was only number four on the official list – even though that would still be wrong.

For the purpose of this list, I first put together my rankings of the top players at every single position, but then somewhat went off script by just writing down names in the order that they shot into my head, before comparing it with the positional rankings and trying to weigh guys against each other. And just to make this clear – these rankings are based on players regardless of their position, since otherwise would have almost half the starting quarterbacks in the league within the top 20 or so. And of course this is a bit of a projection and not solely built on what these players did this previous season, but also not about where they will be at the end of 2020.

Here is my list:

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NFL Top 100

NFL Top 100 Players of 2019:

So usually I wait for the NFL Network to finish their countdown and then I can look at some of the comparisons, but for some reason they won’t start releasing episodes until two-and-a-half weeks from now. Since training camps are in full swing at that point and I want to look at position battles or maybe even look forward to specific games and such as, I decided to reveal my list now already – which is where I usually do anyway.

Like I do every year, I want to clear up the criteria first. This is a list for the top players in 2019 – therefore players who will miss several games due to suspension (Patrick Peterson for example) or injury (Sheldon Rankins to a lesser degree) won’t be included and I also put together a couple of names that I am just not sure yet about what their status for the upcoming year is. Please understand that I am looking at these players as individual talents and will not reward them fully for what they have around them in terms of teammates or coaches.

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NFL Top 100

NFL Top 100 Players of 2018:

Like I do every year once the official player’s countdown is fully released, I wanted to make my own top 100 list. There is a serious misconception about the voting process. While opinions are heavily based on last year, this list is about the 2018 NFL season. It’s not about grading what they did last year alone, but rather what to expect from them this upcoming campaign. That’s why it is the top 100 players of 2018. I mean only 12 teams even played this year so far. Of course you should have recency bias to some degree, but you also have to look at the body of work and what you believe they are capable of. Without any further ado, here’s what I came up with:

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NFL Top 100

NFL Top 100 Players of 2017:

Once again NFL players voted for their peers to be named among the top 100 for this upcoming season. I want to reiterate that once more. The list might be based on what you saw from these athletes last year, but you project how well they will play in the 2017/18 season. I like the whole idea of it, but players seem to get confused with fellows who missed time or simply didn’t play at the level they’re capable of. Sure, you have to take availability into account, but as long as they’re cleared medically you aren’t supposed to project to them to be injured. At the same time you need to bump players who are suspended for a certain amount of games (like I did with Brady a year ago) or if there still are legitimate health concerns. I didn’t put offensive linemen as high as I would if the list was solely about the best players, since the question is how much value they present and that unit consists of five guys.

Now that we’ve cleared up the parameters, here’s my list. It might look pretty different to the official one, but I tried to really create it based on value.

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NFL Top 100

NFL Top 100 Players of 2016:

To make this clear right away – I love the NFL Top 100 list. I watch it every single year and they have some great audio clips, commentary and game scenes. But I also often disagree with the rankings, especially because I feel like the players vote for the top performers from the previous season instead of trying to project who the best players during the upcoming season will be. Because of that I listed the most under- and overrated players on the countdown and who I think got snubbed a couple of weeks ago.

Additionally I make my own list every year. To not have to argue about the criteria I didn’t include guys who didn’t play a single snap during the season like Jordy Nelson and Joe Haden, while also excluding someone like Justin Houston, who I’m not sure about if he’ll be cleared to hit the field in 2016. And since Tom Brady will ‘more likely than not’ be suspended for the first four games of the season he also dropped out of my top ten. Other players who struggled with staying on the field in previous years might have also not made the cut.

So here’s my version of the Top 100:

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