Prisco's Top 100 puts Myles Garrett at the apex — and quietly reorders the league's centre of gravity
CBS Sports' annual player rankings land with Myles Garrett on top and three Rams inside the top ten — a list that says as much about roster construction as it does about individual talent.
On 25 June 2026, CBS Sports senior NFL columnist Pete Prisco published his annual ranking of the league's 100 best players, installing Cleveland Browns edge rusher Myles Garrett at No. 1 and placing three members of the Los Angeles Rams inside the top ten. The list, a staple of the pre-training-camp calendar, doubles as a snapshot of where the league's evaluative consensus currently sits — and, just as often, where it strains against reality.
The headline choices are unambiguous. Garrett, the 2025 AP NFL Defensive Player of the Year, has been the league's most unblockable pass-rusher for several seasons running; elevating him to the top spot reflects a defensive-player-first lean that Prisco has historically been willing to make. The Rams' triple presence near the summit is the more telling tell. It signals that the front office's bet on veteran talent — augmented through the trade and free-agent markets rather than the draft — has produced a roster Prisco's panel rates as the most top-heavy in football.
The case for Garrett, restated
Prisco's argument for Garrett is not subtle: there is no defender in the league who bends a protection scheme the way Garrett does, and no offensive coordinator who game-plans around a single opponent at his position. The framing tracks the broader defensive renaissance of the past half-decade, in which edge pressure has come to be understood as the league's most portable, schematic-proof asset. A quarterback can be schemed open; a left tackle can be chipped, doubled, or slid away from. A 6'4", 270-pound edge rusher with a four-second get-off cannot be reasoned with.
The placement also functions as a quiet rejoinder to the quarterly habit of anointing a quarterback No. 1 by default. Prisco's lists have, in recent years, alternated between skill-position superstars and defenders with portable, repeatable impact. That Garrett has now received the nod says less about the Browns' 2026 ceiling than about the league's shifting understanding of where football games are actually won.
Three Rams, one thesis
The Rams' representation in the top ten is the list's most consequential data point. Los Angeles has spent the better part of three seasons trading future draft capital for established veterans, a roster-construction philosophy that drew sharp criticism in some corners of the analytics community when the team first began selling off first-round picks. The bet, articulated by the front office and endorsed by head coach Sean McVay, was that a defined championship window was worth mortgaging optionality.
Prisco's list is the first major mainstream validation of that bet. Three Rams inside the top ten is not a fluke; it is the result of a roster built to peak right now. The implied argument is that Los Angeles has the league's best player at one premium position and two of the best at two others, with the supporting cast layered behind them. Critics will note that such rosters are fragile — a single injury to a top-ten player can collapse the entire thesis — and that Los Angeles has limited recourse through the draft to restock. But the rankings are a snapshot, not a projection, and the snapshot favours the Rams.
What the list leaves out
Prisco's list is annual liturgy in NFL media, and it carries the same blind spots every year. The voters do not see practice; they see game tape and reputation. Young players breaking out tend to under-rank, veterans coasting on name recognition tend to over-rank, and players on bad teams tend to lose ground to equivalents on contenders regardless of their individual production. The Rams' three top-ten placements, for instance, are partly a function of the team's 2025 win total; equivalent performances on a 6-11 club would not have earned the same recognition.
The list is also, by construction, an exercise in inevitability rather than discovery. By the time a player is widely viewed as top-ten, the news has usually been written months earlier. What the rankings can do — and what they do, year after year — is legitimise a consensus view and put a face on it. In 2026, that face is Garrett's, and that consensus is that Los Angeles has built something unusual.
The stakes for the season ahead
For the Browns, Garrett's placement is a public-relations win in a league where defensive stars often struggle for market share against quarterbacks and skill players. For the Rams, it raises the standard the team will be measured against — a top-ten-heavy roster cannot lose in the divisional round without the season being framed as a failure of execution. And for the league's broader evaluator class, the list is a reminder that roster construction is increasingly about identifying the small set of players who genuinely move winning percentage, and paying whatever the market requires to keep them.
The 2026 list does not pretend to settle the debate over whether the Rams' approach is sustainable, nor does it claim Garrett is unchallenged at his position. It does something simpler: it tells the league, in order, who matters most right now. The rest is September.
Desk note: Monexus treats annual player rankings as a measurement instrument rather than news; the analysis above focuses on what the rankings reveal about league-wide roster construction, not on individual player hype.