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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/packmanwiscy on 2025-01-27 18:22:51+00:00.
Greetings r/NFL!
Welcome to the 13th annual r/NFL Top 100 list! The /rNFL community is super excited to renew the tradition of compiling our own Top 100 list, just like the players do! With the offseason fast approaching, we need to start formulating the list now. The first step of this process is to recruit new rankers and draw new blood to participate. That’s what this post is for!
The ranking process is a fun project that we all take seriously, with fun being the most important word here. Our rankers work hard to produce the best list they can with all the film and data that we can get our fingertips on, but at the end of the day this is supposed to be an enjoyable process to engage with the sport during the humdrums of the offseason. It’s incredibly rewarding to take a deeper dive on certain players that might otherwise not be paying attention to during the season, have your assumptions challenged by others and get you thinking, and learn more about the sport that we all love. You will disagree with others along the way, but that is absolutely OK. Cutting the 2000+ players who played in the NFL this year into just 100 guys is no small feat. But just remember that we aren’t experts - nor do we try to be. This is supposed to be fun, and we do have fun!
If you are interested and want to throw your hat into the ring, it’s pretty simple. Go to this link here, and fill out the short 4 question questionnaire. It’ll ask for your username, your team affiliation, a paragraph asking why we should pick you to rank, and an OPTIONAL request to submit any Original Content that you’ve made, here on reddit or on another platform. I will be clear here, OC is NOT a prerequisite to rank, don’t feel intimidated to apply if all you’ve got is reddit comment history.
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Before you fill out the form and say you want in on this, you really need to know what you’re getting into. Please take a couple minutes to read this wall of text ahead to get an idea of the process, and feel free to ask either myself (u/packmanwiscy) my my co-showrunner u/mattkud
- Step 1: Recruiting rankers. That’s what we’re doing here! Many of our participants are repeat rankers, but we’re always looking for fresh minds and replenishing the pool of rankers, trying to find as many willing participants as we can. To be considered, you should be someone who we can at least see from your post history that you are a good fan of your respective team. Ideally we’d like an equal amount of rankers from every team to keep the bias at a minimum, but we’ll definitely prioritize those that seem like they would be good rankers. The karma count doesn’t matter, as long as you aren’t a troll and don’t have completely batshit crazy opinions you should be fine.
- Step 2: Once we have a group of rankers, we’ll get to work. First, the rankers of their respective fanbase nominate the players on their team who they consider worthy of being considered for the list this year. This list usually gives us about 250-ish names to consider, and gives us a good way to narrow down the evaluation process. The nomination process should take about a week
- Step 3: The Tiers. Once this pool of players is created, we will create discussion threads for rankers to break players down into tiers within their positional groupings prior to creating a final Top 100 list submission. Users will be directed to break players into tiers for the other rankers to evaluate: Top 25, Top 50, Top 100, Top 100-125. This is done to separate the players into more manageable chunks to analyze and give rankers the ability to compare notes and see where others lay. If most users have a player in their Top 100 tier but someone has them Top 25 and someone else has them unranked, we can discuss that and see their viewpoint. This really helps rankers visualize where players should land on their list prior to filling out the whole thing and makes the final list making process a little more manageable knowing that you’ve already separated players into different tiers. This part of our schedule takes 1-2 months to complete, this is the real meat of the process because we want everyone to have a thorough discussion on each of the position groups.
NOTE: You will need to participate in the large majority of these threads in order to fill out your final Top 100 list. There will be breaks to allow everyone to catch up on their tiers if they fall behind, but participation in positional tier listing is absolutely required. Inactive users will be periodically removed; if you don’t tier, you don’t get to submit a list.
- Step 4: After discussions are complete, everyone will be asked to submit on their own a personal Top 125 list. We go to 125 to try and create a more representative average at the bottom of the list. If you have all your ducks in a row this should only take a half hour or so, or you can be like me and double and triple check everything and tinker for 2 days before submission. Either way you will be given enough time to complete your ranking sheet. Your list will be public
- Step 5: After your initial ranking comes in, the moderation team for the r/NFL Top 100 reviews the list and contacts the rankers for any potential changes. Our initial compilation flags any rank 2 standard deviations above or below the mean and rankers are required to defend these ranks. Part of this step is to catch genuine mistakes, to make sure you didn’t accidentally leave off Josh Allen or that you didn’t mix him up with Josh Allen-Hines instead. Part of this is to make sure that you aren’t trolling and have sound reasoning behind your more extreme takes. If you can make a coherent argument for those outliers (which most people who make it this far can), then your list remains and gets finalized.
Once all the final rankings are in, we will combine them and create the list using the average rank. Unranked players will be designated with a rank of 140 to tabulate the average for all nominated players. Players ranked 101-125 overall will make the Honorable Mentions while the remaining 1-100 will be the ranked players.
- Step 6: The list reveal and writeups. The list will be revealed 10 ranks at a time, twice a week over a span of about 5 weeks. Accompanying each player is a writeup, written by the rankers, outlining why the player is ranked where they are. Each ranker will be expected to contribute to the player writeups. Think of it as the “show your work” portion of the ranking process. The nitty gritty of ranking might be over by this point, but the writeups are an integral part of the process, we wanna give your favorite NFL players some love! The Top 10 will be divided into two parts, a 10-6 and a 5-1 post, with lengthier writeups. Then we do a recap post and then we’re officially done with this year. By then it’ll be mid-July and we’ll be worrying about training camp.
Still there? I know this looks like a lot of effort, because it is! It’s also worth your time. Personally I’ve learned a ton about the NFL in the six years I’ve participated. You get to meet other hardcore football enthusiasts and learn about players who you might only know in passing. Again, nobody expects you to be an expert, just be open and honest and have some fun along the way
If this is something that you’d be interested in, please sign up. If you don’t want to participate but know someone who you think would be great? Let them know! We are always looking for valuable contributors.