5 Eagles make PFF’s top 101 NFL players list (Jason Kelce gets snubbed)

Say what you want about Pro Football Focus. Some people swear by them. Others believe the content that they put out is a tad overrated, but who are we kidding? Who doesn’t check out their Twitter feed or type their URL into the address bar every so often to see if they’ve come up with a player ranking and if any Philadelphia Eagles have had their names land on the list?

Truth be told, PFF’s rankings engine and premium stats are how a healthy amount of conversations get started among the Inside The Iggles family. Take a recent player ranking that they churned out for instance. While many of us were getting into the meat of a Monday that followed another Super Bowl, they were dropping a list of their top 101 NFL players of the 2021 NFL season. As you might expect, we couldn’t help but take a peek.

Five Eagles earn spots on PFF’s top 101 players ranking. Jason Kelce is noticeably absent.

If you’ve spent any time hanging out on Pro Football Focus, Sam Monson is one of those names that isn’t foreign to you. He puts out a lot of good content for the platform.

Five Philadelphia Eagles made his list of the aforementioned top 101 players ranking. None were surprising adds, but you might find some interest in who he names as the top-ranked Eagle. That honor goes to Jordan Mailata. He cracks the list at 22, and here’s some of what Monson had to say in his take on why that’s the case.

"2021 Snaps: 944 | 2021 PFF Grade: 90.3:The rise of Jordan Mailata continues apace, with a new career benchmark for the man who only took up the sport of football in 2018. The Eagles tackle already beat out a first-round draft pick for the Eagles’ left tackle job and secured himself a big-money contract. This season, he set about proving his ability as an elite player, earning a PFF grade of at least 83.0 in both pass protection and as a run-blocker. Given how new he is to the sport and the incredible size and athleticism he brings to the table, it is still very possible he is still getting better."

Also making the list are Dallas Goedert (23), Lane Johnson (52), Darius Slay (59), and Javon Hargrave (98). Again, that’s a nice list of some pretty spectacular Eagles. We would have placed all of them in the top 50, but who knows? Maybe that’s the bias speaking.

Monson credits Goedert for being a “tough cover for any NFL defense” and being “a big weapon with the ball in his hands”. Johnson earns a 2021 overall PFF Grade of 85.6 after allowing only 11 pressures.

Slay’s 84.5 coverage grade was a career-high, and Big Play earned an overall mark of 81. Hargrave was the lowest-ranked Bird but cracked the list after being unranked a year ago. Did you notice who was absent though? Fletcher Cox is absent, but so is Jason Kelce.

Is this an oversight? Maybe it is. Can we throw this one in the ‘snub’ category? Who knows? Still, either way that you decide to slice it, this is quite the tumble seeing as how Kelce just made Monson’s Third-Quarter All-Pro Team in December.

Five other centers made the list: Creed Humphrey of the Kansas City Chiefs (27), Corey Linsley of the Los Angeles Chargers (37), David Andrews of the New England Patriots (75), J.C. Tretter of the Cleveland Browns (89), and Brian Allen of the Los Angeles Rams (97). They’re all solid, but even still, Kelce is just as good if not better than all of those guys.

Welp, who knows? This could be much ado about nothing, but for the time being (and maybe because we have some free time on our hands, on behalf of Eagles fans everywhere, we demand a recount.