Here we are. The top ten, the best of the best, the ten players the offGrid writers judged the finest in football across the 2025 season. Argue with the order all you like; there is not a bad name among them.
10. Nick Bonitto – EDGE, Denver Broncos
(AVP: 10.0)
The breakout is complete. Bonitto is now a genuine, feared, double-digit-sack edge rusher, and Denver’s defence is terrifying because of it.
His speed off the edge is close to unblockable one-on-one, and paired with Surtain in the secondary, Bonitto’s rush and Denver’s coverage feed each other in a vicious loop. He forced his way into the top ten on production nobody can wave away.
9. Sam Darnold – QB, Seattle Seahawks
(AVP: 9.6)
The redemption arc is complete, and it ends exactly where these things are supposed to, with a ring.
Written off by half the league not long ago, Darnold led Seattle to the NFC’s number one seed and then through the playoffs to a championship in his first season in the building. Whatever the doubters made of the earlier chapters, the final one is not up for debate; he was the quarterback of a Super Bowl winner, and he played like it.
8. James Cook – RB, Buffalo Bills
(AVP: 9.0)
The engine of Buffalo’s ground game, and one of the most dangerous dual-threat backs in the sport.
Cook turns Josh Allen’s offence into a genuine two-headed monster, a home-run threat on the ground with the receiving skills to punish any defence that keys on the pass. He is exactly the kind of back a great quarterback needs, and Buffalo builds around him for good reason.
7. Will Anderson Jr. – EDGE, Houston Texans
(AVP: 8.3)
The best young edge rusher in football, and the centrepiece of a Houston defence that scares just about everybody.
Anderson combines power, bend and a non-stop motor, and paired with Danielle Hunter he anchors a pass rush capable of winning games on its own. He is only getting better, which ought to worry the rest of the AFC a great deal.
6. Drake Maye – QB, New England Patriots
(AVP: 5.8)
A year ago he was a promising young quarterback on a rebuilding team. He finished this one as an MVP runner-up who dragged New England to a Super Bowl.
Maye’s leap was the story of the season on offence, a big-armed, mobile passer who married the physical tools to a sudden command of the game, and the Patriots’ record-setting nine road wins were built on his shoulders. Only Matthew Stafford stood between him and the MVP; at his age, that is a frightening sentence for the rest of the league.
5. Puka Nacua – WR, Los Angeles Rams
(AVP: 5.5)
When Nacua is on the field, the Rams’ offence operates on a different plane. He is that important.
A yards-after-catch monster with a route tree far broader than his profile once suggested, Nacua was Stafford’s security blanket and his big-play engine all at once, and he pushed the Offensive Player of the Year vote to the wire. There is no harder receiver in football to bring down after the catch; ask any defence that tried.
4. Jaxon Smith-Njigba – WR, Seattle Seahawks
(AVP: 4.6)
The best wide receiver season in football belonged to JSN, and the Offensive Player of the Year award simply confirmed it.
Smith-Njigba led the NFL in receiving yards on his way to 1,793 and a championship, a route-running savant who turned Seattle’s passing game into the engine of a title run. He edged Puka Nacua and Christian McCaffrey for the award, and then he went and won the whole thing; a complete season, start to finish.
3. Matthew Stafford – QB, Los Angeles Rams
(AVP: 3.8)
At thirty-seven, in a career that had already delivered a ring, Stafford produced the finest individual season of the lot and finally claimed an MVP for it.
He was surgical all year, driving a Rams offence to the brink of the Super Bowl and holding off a ferocious challenge from Drake Maye for the game’s biggest individual honour. That it took this long feels like an oversight the voters were happy, at last, to correct; a first MVP, richly deserved, and no gift of circumstance.
2. Josh Allen – QB, Buffalo Bills
(AVP: 2.5)
The reigning MVP remains, on any given Sunday, the most physically gifted quarterback in the sport, and one of the most valuable players to any team, full stop.
Allen carries Buffalo with his arm, his legs and a competitive fire that borders on the unreasonable, and even when the roster around him thins he keeps the Bills squarely in the title picture. He can win a game by himself in a way almost no one else can; that alone keeps him near the very top of these lists.
1. Myles Garrett – EDGE, Cleveland Browns
(AVP: 2.2)
One name, above all the rest. In a year defined by defence, no player was more dominant, or more historic, than Myles Garrett.
Garrett set the NFL’s single-season sack record with 23, was a unanimous Defensive Player of the Year for the second time, and did it all on a Browns side that gave him precious little help; the individual brilliance simply refused to be diminished by the situation around it. He is the best defensive player in football, and now having recently joined the Rams, he’s on a mission to win the biggest prize in the sport.
Our number one for 2025.