After opening with numbers 50 to 41, the countdown of our best players from 2025 continues and we move into the back half of the list. As ever, this is the average vote of offGrid’s writers across the 2025 season, and we expect you to have opinions.
Numbers 40 to 31 are below.
40. Kenneth Walker III – RB, Seattle Seahawks
(AVP: 37.2)
He saved his best for the brightest stage, and walked off it with the Super Bowl LX MVP award in his hands.
Walker’s 135 rushing yards on Super Bowl Sunday were the emphatic full stop on a season in which Seattle leaned on his contact balance and his burst all the way to a ring. He runs angry and he runs decisively; the Patriots, like plenty before them, found there was no clean way to bring him down.
39. Maxx Crosby – EDGE, Las Vegas Raiders
(AVP: 35.8)
No player in football plays harder, snap for snap, than Maxx Crosby. It is not close.
On a Raiders side with precious little around him, Crosby remained a relentless, disruptive force, the sort of motor that drags a pass rush along by sheer will. Put him on a contender and the conversation about the league’s best edge grows another serious name overnight.
38. Cameron Heyward – DT, Pittsburgh Steelers
(AVP: 35.1)
Three years on from his last appearance in one of these lists, and Heyward is somehow still here, still dominant, still refusing to go quietly.
In his mid-thirties he anchors the Steelers’ interior with the same power and craft that has defined a wonderful career, and while the years should have caught him by now, nobody appears to have told the tape. Past his prime, and still, week after week, a problem no offensive line enjoys solving.
37. Quinyon Mitchell – CB, Philadelphia Eagles
(AVP: 34.0)
The second-year corner has become exactly what Philadelphia hoped, and rather quicker than most.
Mitchell shadows, he presses, and he does the unglamorous work of a lockdown corner without the volume of splash plays that tend to draw votes; the Eagles trust him against the opposition’s best, and that trust is the highest compliment the position offers. Among outside corners, few faced tighter windows and lived to tell it.
36. De’Von Achane – RB, Miami Dolphins
(AVP: 33.2)
Pure, terrifying speed, packaged with the receiving chops to make it count on every down.
Achane is a matchup nightmare in space, and even on a Miami side that spent much of 2025 in disarray, he was the one player defences genuinely feared. Give him a crease and the angle is already gone; give him a checkdown and it can just as easily go eighty.
35. Trent Williams – OT, San Francisco 49ers
(AVP: 31.9)
Even this deep into his career, Williams remains the standard against which left tackles are measured.
When available, he is still arguably the most gifted offensive lineman alive, moving in the run game like a man half his size and stonewalling the league’s best rushers in protection. Injuries have started to take their toll on the availability; they have never once touched the level when he is out there.
34. Jared Verse – EDGE, Los Angeles Rams
(AVP: 30.6)
The reigning Defensive Rookie of the Year did not slow down. He sped up.
With the Rams, Verse played with a nastiness LA had built their entire front around, and his second season confirmed the first was no fluke, a genuine cornerstone rusher on a defence that took Los Angeles within a whisker of the Super Bowl. Now with the Browns, he will continue to set the tone, and hopefully become a difference maker in Cleveland.
33. Jordan Love – QB, Green Bay Packers
(AVP: 29.8)
The arm talent has never been the issue; in 2025, with Micah Parsons arriving to terrorise the other side of the ball, the whole operation finally began to look complete.
Love throws receivers open and layers the deep ball with the best of them, and while the odd back-breaking turnover still creeps in, the Packers have a quarterback capable of carrying them when it matters. The rest of the roster is at last catching up to him.
32. Devin Lloyd – LB, Jacksonville Jaguars
(AVP: 28.5)
The breakout that always felt likely finally arrived, and it arrived loudly.
Lloyd flew around the field for Jacksonville in 2025, a sideline-to-sideline linebacker who took the ball away and set the tempo of a much-improved defence. Range, instincts and a genuine nose for the football; he became the beating heart of that unit almost overnight. Now with the Panthers, expect load to continue his dominance after getting paid.
31. Jack Campbell – LB, Detroit Lions
(AVP: 27.9)
The knock on Campbell coming out of Iowa was that he lacked splash. Three seasons in, that reads like a bad joke.
Campbell has become the thumping, intelligent core of Detroit’s defence, equally at home stuffing the run and dropping into coverage, and the Lions ask an enormous amount of him for a reason. He is the kind of every-down linebacker the modern game was supposed to have phased out.