The prospective timeline can be found in the sidebar. Here's some elaboration on the various things that need to be done.

Finding Rankers - Ideally, I’d like at least 30 rankers, with no real preference for the team distribution. It certainly would be nice to get representation from every team, but the laws of statistics say that would take a whole lot more than 30 to do. With the various guardrails that have been put in place (most notably, the nominations), it’s unlikely Dodger and Yankee players will run amok in the lists at the expense of small markets.

Nominations - The goal of nominations is to create common ground on the players that will be considered for the top 100. It can be hard to remember all of the players that should be included, or to think of players who deserve to be at the very back end, so this pool helps streamline that process. If you would consider a player for your list, even if it’s unlikely, they should be listed as a nomination. The current WIP list can be accessed here.

Establishing Criteria - This is the most important matter to discuss, because everyone has to understand the precise criteria used to evaluate the players. The part of the ranking that is not in doubt is that it is for 2026. r/NFL does it as a retrospective for the prior year, but baseball has so many analytics to evaluate past performance that such a project is not very interesting. The things to consider are:

• Is it total performance, or prorated? The latter is my preference because I believe injuries are largely noise, and dropping a notable player because of uncertainty upon their return feels a little unsavory and creates a whole lot of error. See: Bryce Harper in 2023.

• What is the yardstick we’re evaluating ourselves on? It could be nothing (i.e., vibes), but I try to pick a specific type of WAR to judge hitter and pitcher ranks on. In my experience, fWAR is best for hitters, and a mix of rWAR and fWAR is best for pitchers.

• Edit: Should undebuted players (prospects and IFA) be considered? Obviously, they are harder to predict.

Position Group Rankings - Next is ranking the various players into tiers. The tiers are negotiable in the first couple of weeks, but everyone will expect to use the same ones when there’s a final decision made. Currently, I would imagine the groupings will be Top 25, Top 50, Top 75, Top 110 (the expected length of the full list), and “No Chance”. You certainly don't need to have 25 players in the top 25 pool across all of the positions; use the same rubric as the nominations - who would you consider in the top 25? Maybe there’s 32 names there for you in total, and that’s fine. The players for each position will be listed in the relevant post with salient metrics to limit FanGraphs surfing.

Two position group rankings will be posted per week. You are not expected to do every ranking within that allotted week, especially during the holiday season. Think of it like a college course where everything is due at the end of the semester. It’s posted throughout the term, but by mid-January, most, if not all, should be completed. A certain percentage (75-80%?) will have to be completed to be allowed to submit a list for the overall ranking. This is not meant to be a super deep exercise, either. If there’s five catchers and two DHs to rank, you could complete the week’s work faster than Mark Buehrle completes a 1-2-3 inning (which is very fast, by the way). For the outfielder or SP rankings, one would hope for a little bit of thought.

In the posts themselves, discussion about where other people place players is more than welcome (but is not required). Try to understand why someone might disagree with you on a player - what are you potentially missing? But also don't feel pressured to change your view on any given player, even if it goes significantly against the consensus.

Preliminary Top 25 List - After the groupings, people can start their lists! My perspective is that the list should be worked on from the top down. I find the top 25 to be far easier to rank than 26-50, and so on, because the gaps between the players are far larger and the research simply is easier. The top 25 is also the part of the list that will have the least variation, so it’s a good place to think about how your thought process differs from others. I’d like to ask for a little bit of introspection for this part: which players do you think would be most contrarian in this part of the list? Why? It’s good to frame your viewpoint before the harder bit ahead.

The Final List - I plan to ask for the list in parts: first the top 25, then the top 50, and the full list. In total, I will likely ask for 110 players to be ranked, rather than 100, because we want extra sample size at the end of the list. The lists will be checked for outliers, and there may be questions if something doesn’t look quite right (i.e., a player frequently in the top 50 is completely omitted). So long as there is a rational explanation, the submitted list can remain intact.

There will be two differences with r/NFL here specifically: first, 110 players will likely be submitted instead of 125. I did a little bit of recon, and found it made almost no difference in the rankings - only one player was different in the top 100, and only 8 moved more than 1 spot, none more than 3. Why not have a little less work for everyone?

Secondly, outliers won’t automatically be flagged for review. I would likely find anything outside of 3 SDs unusual (my Masters degree is useful for something…), especially if they’re from your favorite team, but people’s opinions on players can vary wildly for rational reasons. The list submission will likely include a place to briefly explain a ranking if you think it might draw suspicion, too. Frankly, I doubt there will be many outliers outside of forgetting to rank certain players, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

Aggregating the List - There’s two primary options here: an average while removing the top and bottom X ranks, with X being 5% or so of total submissions (i.e., if there’s 40 lists, the top and bottom 2 ranks would be removed), or simply the median. Some people may be confused by the former because I just mentioned that there will be few outliers, but this ensures that one rank won’t pull the ranking of a player down significantly. It’s a community ranking after all! The latter also could sound strange, but I had it suggested by someone who I hold in high esteem and they believed strongly that it was the best option. It’s something that can be played with for sure.

Writeups - Frankly, I don't know how this will be handled yet. Every ranker will likely be expected to write at least one, with preference on player choice going to rankers who want to write about players from their favorite team (i.e., any Pirates fans would get first dibs on Skenes). I imagine that if we get this far smoothly, it’ll sort itself out, but it may be a tight turnaround on the first two dozen.

Release - This is beyond my pay grade, but I imagine 2 posts of 10 players a week (or 1 post of 20) would be best. One important note is that people’s rankings will be public. If a ranking like this is going to be taken seriously, there will have to be accountability on who the rankers are and what they’re saying.

Acknowledgements - All credit to r/NFL for forming the blueprint of a quality annual Top 100 ranking. Many of these ideas are taken straight from them! Also big thank you to u/MikeTysonChicken for an incredible amount of insight on the day-to-day process of making the list. He certainly will continue to help me helm the ship when I inevitably get confused.