Jets Representation on the NFL’s Top 100 Drops Mightily

One of my favorite things is the NFL Top 100 List, where the players themselves vote on the best 100 players in the league based on the previous season. It’s a great example of peer review that can sometimes be muddied by bias, but for the most part, it’s just NFL players talking ball.

Coming into last season, the Jets had five players make the list and receive praise from their peers:

• Quincy Williams ranked 32nd
• Sauce Gardner ranked 37th
• Quinnen Williams ranked 38th
• Garrett Wilson ranked 72nd
• Aaron Rodgers ranked 92nd

They also traded for a 6th player, Haason Reddick, who was ranked 87th on last year’s list. This is the largest number of Jets to appear in a single NFL Top 100 list, beating the 2-way tie of four Jets that occurred in 2011 and 2016. Of course, the team fired their Head Coach after 5 weeks, only won 5 games, and an entirely new regime is taking a crack at developing largely the same core of young players into (hopefully) the next great team.

How Many Jets Made the Top 100 in 2025?

It doesn’t seem like the NFL players are too impressed, though, since Quinnen Williams is the only Jet to return to the Top NFL 100 this year. And he appears as #87, meaning he dropped a whopping 49 spots on the list!

I’ve seen calls within the fanbase for snubs for the other players, like Sauce and Garrett. Garrett had the most catches, yards, and touchdowns of his young career last year, but that wasn’t enough to maintain his spot on the list. A possible reason for this is that last year’s list had 19 wide receivers, but this year only has 16. They voted Garrett the 16th-best receiver in the league last year. With spectacular rookie campaigns from Brian Thomas Jr., Malik Nabers, and Ladd McConkey, maybe Garrett moved down a slot or two, and we would’ve seen him if this list still included 19 receivers.

We can’t say the same for Sauce. He had the worst year of his career last year, and his peers noticed. At #38 last year, that was the third-highest spot for a cornerback. This year, they included seven cornerbacks, and Sauce wasn’t one of them. Before you attack the players, it’s worth noting that PFF ranked Sauce as the 31st-best cornerback in the NFL last year. We don’t know if the players agree that he fell that far, but all we know by his omission from the Top 100 is that he wasn’t a Top 7 CB. I think we should all be able to agree with that.

As for Qunicy, I feel this is the true snub of the bunch. His solo tackles and pass deflections definitely took a drop, but all of his other numbers were either the same or better than in previous years. I guess PFF thought his play dipped enough to demote him from 10th in 2023 to 33rd in 2024, and PFF ranked his teammate Jamien Sherwood over him (18th). Still, neither Jet LB made the Top 100 this year.

I’m expecting better things from this team this year. When we talk about the NFL Top 100 in 2026, I’m expecting to see Quinnen, Sauce, Garrett, and at least one other person. It could be the linebackers, it could be a running back, maybe Will McDonald breaks out? The possibilities are endless. Let’s go Jets!