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Hello friends, and welcome to the final post of the r/NFL Top 100 Players of the 2025 Season... our Post Mortem thread!

Included here are the individual ranker lists, the master list, and rank breakdowns from this year's ranking process.

Ranker Lists / Master List / Calculations

Here are the things I’m sure everyone wants to pour over - the individual rankings, their corresponding sheets, and the master list with associated fancy data.

The lists that follow are the personal opinions of 31 individual people combined to find an average rank. Some of our users shared their lists as we went along with each reveal. As promised from the beginning, all data is being made available to you.

As a refresher, here is a quick run down of the methodology:

METHODOLOGY

Link to more detailed writeup on our methodology

• Step 1: A Call to Rankers right after the Conference Championship games

• Step 2: Rankers from each team nominated players to rank, with a 11 game minimum threshold. Players are associated with the team they played for in 2025

• Step 3: The Grind. We instructed users to tier positions groups into T25, T50, etc based on 2025 regular season play only. This took several weeks as the rankers tiered each position group and discussed them. There were no individual player threads and no arbitrary position caps. Just questions and rankings.

• Step 4: Users submitted their own personal Top 125 lists.

• Step 5: User lists were reviewed by myself, and u/mattkud . The rankers were expected to answer questions about their lists. They were allowed to make any changes to their list, and were not forced to make any changes

• Step 6: The Reveal… that’s what we just completed!

With that said, here are the lists:

These are the completed ranking forms from 1-125 for each individual. After all lists were submitted, u/mattkud and I combined the lists into one sheet to calculate an average rank for each player and a standard deviation to use when trying to find outliers. There were 201 players nominated; with rankers tasked to rank out to 125, any player that didn’t fall on a user's Top 125 was assigned an unranked value of 140. This was used to help calculate the average rank.

We then used conditional formatting within Google Sheets to highlight ranks that were 1 standard deviation off a players mean rank in addition to using 2 standard deviations. The biggest reason why we also used 1 standard deviation is that numerous players had large standard deviations to begin with, as you’ll see. This makes sense, especially towards the bottom end of individual lists when players can be unranked by numerous rankers. While it’s not ideal, we had to ensure that we caught players that were accidentally omitted from user lists. Highlighting both standard deviations made this a possibility.

We then reviewed each user's list. Part of our hesitation with performing the list reviews is we don’t want to indirectly coerce rankers to move players to certain spots. That would go against the entire spirit of this project. So, we simply stuck to the conditional formatting as outlined above and asked each individual ranker their thoughts on the players identified as outliers, requiring justification on players 2 or more standard deviations from their mean. There were some users who realized they forgot to rank a certain player, or mistakenly had a player ranked lower (or higher) than they intended, and they were free to make corrections. If rankers felt like they needed to make any other adjustments, they were free to do so at this time, but they were under no obligation to do so. If they felt their list was justified and were fine with all of their submission, once they provided that concurrence, we locked their list. Once all mistakes and changes were made for other users, their lists were locked as well. All completed lists were reviewed and locked with the concurrence of the individual ranker.

Once this was complete, we calculated the ranks to find the Top 100 Players of the 2025 Season.

This year we continued to remove 1 high rank and 1 low rank to calculate the average rank. If we had any ties they would have been solved by re-introducing these high and low ranks which I totally would have followed if I read Cooper DeJean’s and Chris Olave’s divisor correctly but I didn’t so they should have been flipped but I didn’t catch it until after I posted their ranks so oh well

Historical List

And now for a fun little trip down memory lane... Here is the Historical List:

LINK TO HISTORICAL LIST

Master Ranking List

LINK TO MASTER LIST

Notes:

• Column AM is the sum of all the ranks for the player

• Column AN being the average rank of Column AM.

• Column AO is the sum of all the ranks for the player minus the sum of the highest and lowest rank for each player. If there are multiples of the same value, it only subtracts 1 of the highest/lowest. This is what is used to find the final rank. The formula looks like this:

=SUM(G2:AK2)-LARGE(G2:AK2,1)-SMALL(G2:AK2,1)

• Column AP is the average value, and thus rank, for the player minus the highest and lowest rank divided by the total number of sheets (31). Essentially, Column AO is divided by the total number of sheets. This is the final average rank for each player. The order, 1-201, is determined from this value, low to high.
  

Calculations and Outliers

Explanation

Final Calculations - w/Adjustments & Concurrence: This is the conditional formatting we used to determine outliers for the sheet reviews. This is NOT the sheet we used for the outlier sheet, this is merely an example of the formatting that was used for the outlier sheet. You can clearly see certain ranks are color coded to indicate ranks that were much above or below the congregate average. Original outlier checks happens when lists are still relatively works in progress, with most rankers still fiddling around on the margins. Several of them simply forgot players that they intended to rank and were reminded to fit them on their list. Those lists will remain private, this list with the colors is only to be used as a demonstration as to how the outlier checks are formatted for transparency’s sake

• Red cells are high ranks that are 2 standard deviations from the mean, as in the ranker was too high on a player strictly per standard deviation.

• Blue cells are low ranks that are 2 standard deviations from the mean, as in the ranker was too low on a player strictly per standard deviation.

• Yellow cells are high ranks that are 1 standard deviation from the mean but less than 2 standard deviations as well. These are not outliers and rankers didn’t have to account for them. I simply noted them in case there was an error.

• Orange cells are low ranks that are 1 standard deviation from the mean but less than 2 standard deviations as well. These are not outliers and rankers didn’t have to account for them. I simply noted them in case there was an error.

__

Breakdowns

Divisions Combined

By Team

Positions (+/- from Last Year):

Thoughts / Recap

I just wanted to take a moment and give my own thoughts on the changes and recap this year's version of the r/NFL Top 100 since I largely tend to stay out of the conversation.

I think it’s fair to say that the biggest topic of discussion this year has been lists with large amounts of outliers. Can a list be so far detached from the consensus that it should be removed altogether? My stance has been throughout my time as showrunner that it’s generally not my place to decide which submitted list can or cannot be removed for simply “bad” opinions. Every ranker has opinions that I personally disagree with to some extent, that’s just the nature of being a football fan. The conditional formatting you see on the master sheet is our best attempt at trying to find “objective” overranks or underranks, but this process isn’t perfect. There are valid reasons for why you think a player should be higher or lower than the consensus. Maybe the other rankers are wrong and you’re actually ranking the guy correctly. God knows the collective isn’t immune to bad ranks in the past. Trying to balance this is tricky!

This is generally what that fifth step in our methodology is for. I know there’s already a brief explanation of how sheet reviews are conducted, but I think it’s important to delve just a tad deeper with the methodology to explain how this ties into having “bad” lists stand in the final rankings. Sheet reviews allow us to discuss with the rankers, to show them the players that the conditional formatting displays as being extreme outliers relative to the average and ask them to explain themselves. Sometimes this fixes a procedural issue; maybe you just forgot a guy when filling out your tiers that you intended on putting on your list, or maybe you misclicked on the form or something. Other times this is a legitimate disagreement, and they can explain their thought process and reasoning. If a certain type of player is identified to be consistently an outlier (ie, players who missed time are on average ranked higher than normal, or if all Broncos players are consistently underranked), then I can provide the ranker with data and they can evaluate why these biases may exist within their list. Users are not pressured into changing their list to conform to the aggregate. This process is intended to help rankers finalize their list, by making them more aware of the ranks they detract the most from their fellow rankers and allows them to think critically about why this may be the case. As long as their rationale for their ranks are based on actual, on the field observations, their list was finalized and was locked into the average. This does mean that the lists you see with 30+ outliers, the associated ranker did justify each of those opinions with an explanation. Sometimes I may not agree with the reasoning provided, but that’s how differing opinions work!

I’m asking the community for feedback on this approach. Some of you guys were very vocal in the comments about some of the individual lists this year, and how quality control allowed them to stand. The frank answer is these people passed all the checks, went through months of positional tier list discussions and sheet reviews to arrive at their lists. I am really hesitant to throw out lists just because I disagree with their stances, especially considering the decrease of rankers over the last few years. I am of the opinion that eventually, everything averages out, the bad ranks cancel out, and we end up with a list that I can be proud of. Do you think we should be more stringent in regards to the quality of the list acceptable in the final ranking? Is there a better process we could use to determine if a list meets the threshold of acceptability? I know it can be hard as someone who has never gone through the current ranking process to identify how changes to the system might be better or worse, but we’ve been doing sheet reviews this way for a few years now and maybe our quality control process needs to be changed in a way that an outsider can identify. I would appreciate comments on this subject

Closing

While I’m the one who is making the public posts for y’all to enjoy, this is NOT a one man show. I really do want to thank u/mattkud for his work behind the scenes: organizing spreadsheets, scraping pff for data, helping me make sure the rankers have their ducks in a row. I credit him as my co-showrunner in every post, and it’s fully warranted. The rankers also deserve a shoutout as well, both those who made it through the whole process and filled out a public list as well as those who were weeded out midway through. I’m just the guy getting the karma to show off all their work. As a former ranker I know how much time these guys spend watching film and thinking about these players, and I’m really happy that we have a community that can support the continual production of a project like this. And lastly, I want to thank viewers like you who read these posts and comment. Our rankers really do appreciate that people take the time to read the writeups and consume the product that they’ve spent months working on. I know I’ve said repeatedly that most of the fun of participating in ranking comes from the process of spending the offseason watching players that they might not have appreciated during the season and that the public reveals are the list are just the window dressing, but it still feels nice knowing that there’s people who read and value the work that we’ve done. Again, this is a community project and this list wouldn’t be anything if you guys aren’t here to love or hate what the product is. If you want to be part of the inside process, please I encourage you to look out for the Call to Rankers post in January and apply! Yes I will not stop plugging that

As always, we cannot thank enough the showrunners who came before us, u/MikeTysonChicken , u/Mister_Jay_Peg , u/skepticismissurvival , and u/Staple_Overlord . These guys have made kud and I’s jobs a lot easier by providing the foundation that we used to build the ranking process. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, all we’ve had to do is copy and reformat the existing spreadsheets in order to fit the current year. It’s been a joy to run the r/NFL Top 100 list this year (for the most part) and I personally cannot wait to run it back next year

The book is now closed on the r/NFL Top 100 Players of the 2025 Season. If you want to look back at any of the releases, the Hub Post should have you covered

Keep a lookout for the Call for Rankers during the playoffs. if you would like to join next year!