Blogging The Boys
In a recent post on how Cowboys free agent/trade acquisitions augment the roster, we looked at positional rankings to understand where Cowboys players rank against their NFL peers.
We also took deep-dive look at the top 35 players on the roster (as per positional ranking) on the assumption that the top 32-35 players represent the projected starting lineup and immediate rotational depth of an NFL team, and that sufficient quality among your top 35 separates contenders from lottery teams. But looking at that 35-player list in a vacuum left us with more questions than answers, so readers asked to compare those numbers against the other NFC East teams, which is exactly what we’re going to do today.
The idea behind positional rankings is to find a metric that makes all players in the league comparable. Currently, the only service that offers a metric for every single player in the league is Pro Football Focus (PFF), but instead of looking at the grades they assign to the players, we’re going to look at where a given player is ranked relative to the other players in the league at his position.
Because each position group has a different number of qualifying players, I’ve converted all positional rankings to a scale of 0 – 100. The highest ranked player at a position gets 100 points, the lowest ranked player gets zero, everybody else lands somewhere in between.
I did that calculation for all NFC East players on the 2025 and 2026 rosters based on the overall ranking scale provided by PFF and divided the results into quintiles, which delivers the following positional ranking groups:
body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; } body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th { padding: 0px 6px !important; } Positional Ranking Description100-80Blue-Chip Players79-60NFL starter quality at position59-40Average to slightly below average player39-20Underperformer19-0Red FlagSome analytical housekeeping: For this entire analysis, 150 snaps for the respective NFC East team is the minimum threshold for inclusion for every player into the Top 35. For kickers and punters, that number is 100 special teams snaps. The ranking for each player is determined by their PFF ranking (by total offense or total defense), I’ve listed the minimum thresholds for those rankings for every position at the bottom of this post. Because I’ve had to massage those thresholds to fit the NFC East players, some data points for Cowboys players differ slightly versus the previous post linked above.
With that out of the way, one fairly straightforward way of comparing rosters is to look at how the Top 35 stretch across the quintiles for each team, with the hypothesis that more players in the blue and green quintiles indicate a stronger roster.
body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; } body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th { padding: 0px 6px !important; } Top 35 Positional Ranking CowboysEaglesGiants****Commanders100-808 113979-601398659-40767739-2077111219-0 —261The roster battle...
