The NFL is back for 2026! With preseason well underway, we turn, as we do every year, to the business of looking back before we look forward.
After the run of previous editions, the offGrid Top 50 returns, our annual reckoning with the best players in football from last year. Over the next five days, we will post an article a day, counting down our top 50 players from across the league.
The offGrid Top 50 is based on the average vote each player received from offGrid writers. Every writer ranked their own top players across the 2025 season, and each entry carries an average voting position drawn from that ballot.
There is plenty here to argue with, plenty of names and plenty of placings. So if you disagree with who we have included, or where we have put them, let us know!
50. Justin Herbert – QB, Los Angeles Chargers
(Average Voting Position: 48.4)
The arm was never the question with Herbert; for years it was everything around it. In 2025, with a little more protection and a lot more purpose, he looked the part of a franchise cornerstone again.
Herbert remains one of the cleanest deep-ball throwers in the league, and under Jim Harbaugh the Chargers have built an identity that finally suits him. He is not yet in the MVP conversation his talent keeps promising, but few quarterbacks are harder to knock off their spot in a collapsing pocket.
49. Garett Bolles – OT, Denver Broncos
(AVP: 47.9)
The most improved offensive lineman of the past half-decade is now, simply, one of the best, full stop.
Bolles anchors the blind side of a Denver front that surrendered pressure sparingly in 2025, and the penalties that once defined him are a distant memory. Protecting a defence-first Broncos side that leaned hard on clean pockets, he has quietly become indispensable.
48. Mike Jackson – CB, Carolina Panthers
(AVP: 47.5)
The least-heralded name on this entire list, and one of the most deserving. Jackson had a season the wider audience simply did not see.
Tied for the NFL lead in passes defended, a first career pick-six, and a wild-card display against the Rams that included an interception of the presumptive MVP; Jackson forced his way into the conversation on volume and on merit. Opposite Jaycee Horn, he saw the targets others avoided, and he answered nearly all of them.
47. Tetairoa McMillan – WR, Carolina Panthers
(AVP: 44.1)
Rookies rarely announce themselves this cleanly. McMillan did, and he took the Offensive Rookie of the Year award home for it.
Big, smooth and reliable in traffic, McMillan gave Bryce Young a genuine number one and gave Carolina a reason to believe. It is one thing to produce as a rookie; it is another to become the load-bearing wall of a passing game that quickly.
46. George Kittle – TE, San Francisco 49ers
(AVP: 42.8)
Age has done nothing to Kittle that his blocking and his hands cannot answer.
Still the most complete tight end in football, Kittle held a battered 49ers offence together through an injury-hit year, and did so at a level younger men could not reach. He remains the rare player who would be a plus starter even if he never caught a pass; the fact that he catches plenty is almost unfair.
45. Derwin James – S, Los Angeles Chargers
(AVP: 42.6)
When healthy, there is no more versatile chess piece in a secondary than James.
He blitzes, he covers the slot, he patrols the deep middle and he hits like a linebacker; the Chargers bend the shape of their defence around what he can do rather than the other way round. Availability has long been the only argument against him, and in 2025 he answered enough of it to remind everyone what a full season of Derwin James looks like.
44. Jared Goff – QB, Detroit Lions
(AVP: 40.5)
The jokes stopped some time ago. Goff is, quite simply, a very good quarterback running one of the league’s best offences.
Precise from the pocket and lethal on rhythm throws, Goff makes the Lions’ machine hum, and while the ceiling debate will follow him forever, the floor he provides is one most franchises would trade heavily to have. Give him a clean pocket and a defined read and few in the league are more accurate.
43. Caleb Williams – QB, Chicago Bears
(AVP: 40)
The talent was never in doubt. In year two, the Bears finally began to build something that let it breathe.
Williams can make throws that belong in a highlight reel and improvisations that make coordinators wince, often in the same drive, but the arrow is pointing firmly upward, and the raw ability remains as high as anyone’s from his draft class. The next step is turning the spectacular into the routine.
42. Dak Prescott – QB, Dallas Cowboys
(AVP: 39.1)
Dallas remains a mess of its own making, and yet, when Prescott plays, they have a chance most weeks.
With George Pickens arriving to give him a genuine second option alongside CeeDee Lamb, Prescott had the tools to keep the Cowboys relevant even as the front office lit fires elsewhere. He is not blameless in Dallas’s frustrations, but he is a very long way from the cause of them.
41. Jordan Mailata – OT, Philadelphia Eagles
(AVP: 38.1)
The former rugby league man is now one of the finest left tackles in the sport, and the story never gets old.
Mailata’s blend of size and feet is faintly absurd, and the Eagles’ running game, the one that carried them to a title the year before, starts with what he does on the edge. Few players have travelled a stranger road to elite status; almost none look more comfortable now they have arrived.