2025 NFL Draft Consensus Big Board: The Top 300 Players in the 2025 NFL Draft, According to 112 Analysts
The 2025 Consensus Big Board is live. 300 players are ranked using data from 112 draft analysts. What makes this consensus board unique? What can we learn from it?
Welcome to the landing page for the Consensus Big Board for the 2025 NFL Draft. As often as possible, I’ve tried to provide it free, without subscription, to as many people as possible.
To that end, this piece is free to everyone, as is the data.
The insights generated from the board, which include analysis like who the most polarizing players are in the draft, the difference between evaluators and forecasters and post-draft team grades will continue to be subscriber-exclusives. This page will be updated as a hub for those pieces so you can find them if you feel the need to.
Using the Consensus Board to Find the Most Polarizing Players in the 2025 NFL Draft
Forecasters and Evaluators: What's the Difference and Why Does it Matter?
From last year:
Even if you don’t want to read those pieces, I would urge a subscription to keep efforts like this running; this project takes dozens of hours every year and many of the boards in use are proprietary and behind paywalls.
What Makes This Consensus Board Different?
There are, by now, a half-dozen or so consensus boards out there. In some respects, they are more useful than this one – many of them have been running throughout the season, giving us a good barometer for a player’s stock and giving fans a genuine look at the players they might want to pay attention to during bowl games.
They also happen to be more focused, with particular emphasis on big-media boards, preventing unorthodox and uninformed rankings from polluting the system.
But I believe there’s a lot of value in this board, too. Every year, I’ve been able to gather anywhere between 50 and 90 big boards to provide a larger survey on the industry’s feelings about prospects in the draft.
For more on that topic, check out this piece.
Why Are The Consensus Boards Different?
I’ve been producing consensus boards since 2014 and have been publishing them since 2015. At the time, there weren’t many – if any – that one could easily find in draft media. Now, there are several. But they don’t agree, even though their goals and data sources are theoretically the same.
This year, so far, I have data from 112 boards [Updated April 21 from 76 to 86, then April 23 from 86 to 106, then one last time on April 24 from 106 to 112]. That will expand, hopefully to near 100, by the time the NFL draft begins [Huzzah!].
I’ve been able to use the size of that data to leverage unique insights, like the ones described above. Using just ten boards wouldn’t give us a meaningful understanding of variance in player rankings and they don’t have the ability to split boards by type.
The boards used in this ranking are all updated in the month of April — some consensus boards take the average of all boards, including ones from the same analyst multiple times over many months — something I try to avoid.
On top of that, there’s also value in the approach I take to the board, which isn’t to average out the ranks across the industry but to average out the implied player values. There is admittedly more transparency in the approach that averages out player ranks across big boards, but it has the unfortunate side effect of suggesting that the difference between 145th and 147th is the same as the difference between 1st and 3rd.
In the NFL draft, that’s not how player ranks or player value works – the decision to rank a player first is a big decision; it signifies that teams should be willing to move heaven and earth to acquire that kind of player. That’s not the case at 145th.
Often, players ranked between 145th and 147th aren’t all that different. But the differences between the two are treated as the same in most consensus methods.
There’s also typically no accounting for player absences in boards. We can demonstrate this using an example, assuming we have 100 analysts ranking players 1 to 100. Not every analyst will rank the same 100 players and most leave players on the cutting room floor that others have decided to put in their top 100.
In this example, Player A is ranked by 50 boards as the 75th-best player in the draft and unranked on the other 50. Player B is ranked by all 100 boards as the 76th-best player. Most approaches to consensus boards will rank Player A as the better player, even though the average opinion on that player is that he is worse than Player B, not better.
This particular board, with its points-based averaging approach and varying penalties for absences on different-sized boards, avoids that problem, at least partially.
The data below is downloadable using a link at the bottom (labeled “Get the data”) and the 300 players are separated into three 100-player pages; an arrow in the upper-right can help you navigate between them. The table is also searchable and sortable.
This week, the table will be updated to include ranks from two different groups of analysts (“Forecasters” and “Evaluators”) as well as the overall rank by consensus. At the moment, it only shows the consensus rank. It will also be updated in the coming days to include rank-adjusted variance, a score that tells us how polarizing the players in the draft are.
If you want a printable Google Sheet, click here.
Also, here’s a giant variance distribution chart of the big board
