Tag Archives: Player Rankings

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 Quarterbacks, NFL Rookies, Player Rankings

Checking in with the rookie and sophomore NFL quarterbacks:

Over the last two drafts, ten quarterbacks were selected within the first 33 picks respectively and now that all but one of them have logged double-digit starts, I thought it was time to review what they’ve shown. I will provide my general thoughts, aided by some advanced metrics, and express my level of confidence in their long-time viability at the pro level.

Just to be clear, I won’t be discussing this year’s eighth and eighth overall selections Michael Penix Jr. (Falcons) and J.J. McCarthy (Vikings), who only saw very limited action in mop-up duty and unfortunately got hurt after a promising preseason showing respectively. Therefore, we’ll be looking at four guys from each of those draft classes.

Let’s dive in, going by chronological order of when they got selected:


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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

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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Player Rankings

Most over- and underrated players in Madden 23:

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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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Player Rankings

Confidence level for new starting quarterbacks:

With the amount of veteran quarterbacks going down with injuries or changes under center in general, I wanted to take a look at this group of young signal-callers and judge how confident their respective teams should by what they’ve shown so far. This list focuses quarterbacks, who have their first extended period of starts this season. So this obviously doesn’t include guys who might be full-time starters now, after taking over at some point last year, and neither is it about signal-callers who simply switched places or went back under center for their squad with the QB1 out of the picture. This is all about potential starters for the future. Because of that, I did not include the Jets Luke Falk either, even though I always liked his ability to throw on time and target, because he started out as third string and the Jets already have a young QB that they are very invested in. So here are these six quarterbacks and my level of confidence in them:

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College Football

Top five college players at each position for 2019 – Defense edition:

After talking about the top offensive players at each position a couple of days ago, we now switch to the defensive side of the ball. So we are looking at the best edge rushers (meaning 4-3 defensive ends and 3-4 outside linebackers primarily), interior defensive linemen (everything from nose tackle to 5-technique), off-ball linebackers, cornerbacks and safeties. Some of these guys are hybrid players, so I judged them according to where they line up primarily and what their best spot is. Once again, my criteria for which I judge them is their tape from their collegiate career so far, including the potential I see for them heading into this season, and I evaluate them as college players instead of NFL prospects, where they might fall a little lower because they don’t have pro measurements or athleticism necessarily.

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College Football

Top five college players at each position for 2019 – Offense edition:

After talking about the most intriguing questions heading into the 2019 college football season, which is right in front of us, I now want to present my five best players at each position. This list is mostly based on where I would rank them right now, but also partially me projecting where they will stack up mid-season. So with some of these established players I really rank them as of right now, but with others I have to consider the talent and what I think they will develop into this year. To do so, I watched plenty of tape on all the top performers from last season (and who stood out to me in limited action) and tried to break them down as individual players. So I did not want to take their team or supporting cast into context and simply judge them based on their ability. Therefore you might not see some of the more common names or guys with the best statistics where you would find them on most lists out there. And to avoid confusion, this is a ranking of them as college players – not simply draft prospects. Today we start things off with the offensive side of the ball.

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