The 2025 NFL season ended on Feb. 8, and the 2026 season starts on Sept. 9. That means the halfway mark of the offseason is May 25… And you know what? We’re close enough: It’s offseason ranking time, baby. This is just a regular ranking, not a power ranking. There’s a difference between the two. A power ranking is a ranking of the teams and players at the time of the ranking. That means injuries matter, and history doesn’t. In a regular ranking, it’s the opposite: Injuries don’t matter, and history does.
If the quarterback is the most important player on any team, the second most important player is the guy who has the best chance of directly stopping the quarterback. We’re looking at edge rushers, and specifically, the ten best edge rushers in the NFL. But first, honorable mentions: Brian Burns, Jared Verse, Byron Young, Jaelen Phillips. Those guys are very, very special ballplayers, but they’re not special enough to crack the elite tier.
10. Nik Bonitto, Broncos
- Contract: Four years, $106 million (through 2029)
- 2025 stats: 619 snaps, 14 sacks, 20.5% pressure rate
- Featured stat: Led the league in quick pressures (43)
Nik Bonitto is a smaller cat. If you’re going to be both small and a productive pass rusher, you’re going to need to win with speed… And if Bonitto isn’t the best speed rusher in the NFL right now, he probably will be in the next couple of seasons.
As far as quick pressures (under three seconds) went in 2025, Bonitto led the league with 43, Abdul Carter had 41, and Will Anderson Jr. was in third with 34. That’s to say that Nik Bonitto has more or less separated himself from the pack when it comes to winning immediately, and he does it at an insane clip (he also led the NFL with a 20.5% pressure rate).
The guy is a certified freak.
9. Trey Hendrickson, Ravens (Bengals)
- Contract: Four years, $112 million (through 2029)
- 2025 stats: 279 snaps, 4 sacks, 14.2% pressure rate
- Featured stat: 17.5 sacks in both 2024 and 2025
Listen: There’s a chance that Trey Hendrickson deserves to be higher on this list. The last two seasons that he was healthy, he dropped 17.5 sacks… that 17.5 led the NFL in 2024. That’s really, really good. But last year, he only played in four games because of a hip injury that ended up needing surgery. On top of that, it was coming off a contract-dispute-laden offseason…
So there’s a very real chance that he was just straight-up done with the Bengals. There’s a chance that he used last year as a season to get healthy before he became a free agent and signed what will probably be his last contract.
My problem with Trey Hendrickson is the sleeves. Everything else about him is really good. His techniques are fun to watch, the way he wins is great, and he’s a pretty violent dude… But he wears sleeves and a visor, so the only skin that he has showing is his hands…
Personally, I don’t like that. Admittedly, it’s a very dumb reason to knock him down to the ninth-best guy, but aesthetic matters to me, and he doesn’t have much of one. If he stopped wearing sleeves, he would probably go up to the fifth spot.
8. Danielle Hunter, Texans
- Contract: One year, $40.1 million (through 2027)
- 2025 stats: 684 snaps, 15 sacks, 14.8% pressure rate
- Featured stat: Four straight seasons of double-digit sacks
First off, it’s pronounced Dan-Eel. When I’m not prepared to read Danielle Hunter’s name, I always get confused a little bit…. And that’s incredibly disrespectful because he’s been amazing for the better part of a decade.
He did have a couple of rough years. In 2020, he had neck surgery that took him out for the whole season. Then in 2021, he played in seven games (where he had six sacks) before he tore his pec and missed the rest of the season. After that, it was amazing. He was a Pro-Bowler from 2022 to 2024, and then he had his second All-Pro season in 2025… at 31 years old.
The bottom line is that when this cat is healthy, he’s going to punish everyone. He’s awesome, and watching him ruin people’s days is an absolute delight.
7. Will Anderson Jr., Texans
- Contract: Three years, $150 million (through 2030)
- 2025 stats: 637 snaps, 12 sacks, 19.4% pressure rate
- Featured stat: Led the NFL in postseason snaps, despite playing only two games.
Will Anderson rocks, and the only reason he’s this low on the list is that everyone else ahead of him has been amazing for longer.
His calling card is that he just can’t be consistently blocked; he had an NFL-leading pass rush win-rate of 26.2%. You know how Myles Garrett can’t be blocked? Anderson wins more often than him… and he’s only going into his fourth season in the NFL, which is terrifying.
The Texans’ defense is full of disgusting and violent psychopaths, and Anderson is the most disgusting and violent psychopath of them all… And I mean that as complimentarily as possible.
6. Aidan Hutchinson, Lions
- Contract: Four years, $180 million (through 2030)
- 2025 stats: 936 snaps, 13.5 sacks, 15.5% pressure rate
- Featured stat: Most defensive snaps by a DE/Edge in the NFL
The general rule with pass rushers is that they need to rotate. That way, they can stay fresh and be as effective as possible as often as possible. However, some guys break that rule, and Aidan Hutchinson is just about as much of an outlier as you can get.
Maxx Crosby’s whole thing is that he never comes off the field, and that’s almost completely true (we’ll get to him later). But he played a total of 832 snaps in 2025. Hutchinson played 936, that’s over 100 more.
Common sense would have you think that he would be less effective in the later part of games because that’s how normal people function. We’re not talking about normal people; we’re talking about 10 of the most violent professional athletes in the world.
Hutchinson got better in the fourth quarter. His pressure and sack rate went from 10.8% and .9% in the first quarter to 28.8% and 3.6% in the fourth quarter. Those are the clutch pressures and sacks; those are the ones that end games.
5. Nick Bosa, 49ers
- Contract: Five years, $170 million (through 2028)
- 2025 stats: 113 snaps, 2 sacks, 16.1% pressure rate
- Featured stat: Not a guy you want to forget about
Since he came into the league, Nick Bosa has been manning the cannon for the metaphorical tank that is the 49ers’ defensive line… except for the two seasons that he’s missed with knee injuries. He tore his ACL in Week 3 last year, so we didn’t get to see hardly anything from him. Luckily, it was his right ACL and not a re-tear of his left ACL (which he tore back in 2020).
Regardless, we’ve seen five phenomenal seasons from the cat, including the 2021 season when he was coming off that first tear. But it was the 2022 season where he was the Defensive Player of the Year (it should’ve been Haason Reddick, but that’s an aside).
Some people can come back from injuries, and some can’t. I imagine that he’ll come back in 2026 and be right back up there in consideration for Comeback Player of the Year… Along with every other person on the 49ers defense.
4. T.J. Watt, Steelers
- Contract: Three years, $123 million (through 2028)
- 2025 stats: 431 snaps, 7 sacks, 10.2% pressure rate
- Featured stat: Former sack-record holder
It really seems like T.J. Watt is going to fall further and further down this list every season. In 2021, he tied Michael Strahan’s record of 22.5 sacks and was the Defensive Player of the Year. In 2023, he had a 19-sack season, but it dropped significantly from there.
He’s getting in the top five based on merit. Sure, he’ll have some games where he’s the best player on the field, but he can go quiet pretty quickly at this point in his career. It stinks, but you’ve got to give the guy his due.
3. Maxx Crosby, Raiders
- Contract: Three years, $106.5 million (through 2029)
- 2025 stats: 832 snaps, 10 sacks, 9.8% pressure rate
- Featured stat: Highest snap percentage of all edges
There’s a good reason that the Ravens were going to trade two first-round picks for Maxx Crosby, and that’s because he gives you the snaps and the production of two players. He never comes off the field, and he gives the same effort for every single snap… and that’s saying a lot because he’s on a team that has been dead after Week 1 for the past four seasons.
The crazy thing is that his 93.6% snap share in 2025 is the lowest percentage of snaps that he’s played over the past four seasons (in 2022, it was 96.4%). That’s wild.
The question now is: How much does he have left in him? Normally, you’d say probably not a whole lot… But that’s what you would say for normal people. But for these freaks? It’s different. You’d be smart to bet on Crosby until two years after his tires explode.
2. Micah Parsons, Packers
- Contract: Four years, $186 million (through 2030)
- 2025 stats: 568 snaps, 12 sacks, 20.1% pressure rate
- Featured stat: Probably still really wants to be an Eagle
We all know that Micah Parsons is awesome, but nothing really shows how awesome someone is more than seeing how the team plays when he’s not on the field. Last year, we got to see that with two teams: the Cowboys and the Packers.
Dallas had a respectable defense in 2024, but after they traded him last offseason, their pass rush evaporated, and they ended up having the worst defense in the entire NFL. Now, you could argue that there are a lot of reasons why the wheels fell off in that case, so let’s look at the Packers post-Micah.
He tore his ACL in Week 15, which means they played three games after (not counting the meaningless Week 18 game). In the three games before Parsons got hurt, the Packers were averaging three sacks per game and a pressure rate of 45.8%. In the three games after he got hurt, those numbers dropped to .66 sacks per game and a pressure rate of 28%. That’s massive.
If that doesn’t convince you that Parsons is the second-best pass rusher in the NFL, then consider this: He’s just really, really good.
1. Myles Garrett, Browns
- Contract: Four years, $160 million (through 2030)
- 2025 stats: 803 snaps, 23 sacks, 15.5% pressure rate
- Featured stat: He’s won one playoff game in his career
He’s a five-time first-team All-Pro, two-time second-team All-Pro, a two-time defensive player of the year, and he holds the record for the most sacks in a single season. If it wasn’t for that pesky Aaron Donald, we could be looking at Myles Garrett as the best defensive player of the millennium.
As long as he’s playing football, it’s hard to think he’ll be anywhere other than No. 1 on any pass rusher list. It all starts and ends with Myles Garrett.
More NFL news and analysis
Add us as a preferred source on Google
