Last week, ESPN’s Seth Walder put together a list of the top-100 MVP candidates for the 2025 NFL season. We already know the five finalists for the actual MVP award—Josh Allen, Trevor Lawrence, Drake Maye, Matthew Stafford, and Christian McCaffrey—and the winner will be announced later this upcoming week at the NFL Honors on Thursday, Feb. 5.
But Walder’s endeavor is a fun exercise in selecting the 100 players who played the best and arguably had the biggest impact on the 2025 season. And for Detroit Lions fans, this is probably a necessary reminder that their team’s core remains extremely talented.
Walder’s list of 100 players included six Lions, five of whom were listed among the top-50. Here’s where each of those players landed on his MVP candidate list:
- WR Amon-Ra St. Brown — 17
- EDGE Aidan Hutchinson — 22
- RT Penei Sewell — 28
- QB Jared Goff — 33
- LB Jack Campbell — 50
- RB Jahmyr Gibbs — 64
To put those rankings into perspective among their peers, here’s where each player ranked among their position group on Walder’s list:
- WR Amon-Ra St. Brown — 4th among WRs
- EDGE Aidan Hutchinson — 5th among EDGEs
- RT Penei Sewell — 3rd among OTs
- QB Jared Goff — 9th among QBs
- LB Jack Campbell — 1st among LBs
- RB Jahmyr Gibbs — 2nd among RBs
And to put the Lions’ six players in context, here are the number of top-100 players that some other notable teams had:
New England Patriots: 4
Seattle Seahawks: 8
Los Angeles Rams: 6
Denver Broncos: 7
Green Bay Packers: 3
Chicago Bears: 2
The best part about the Lions players on this list is that they are all likely to be around for the long term. Goff, St. Brown, Sewell, and Hutchinson are all signed on for at least the next three seasons, while Gibbs and Campbell are likely to join both of them this offseason. And amongst that group of six, only Goff is older than 26 years old, so Detroit’s core of talented players are both entering the primes of their respective careers and will be in Detroit for that span.
This year is proof that star talent isn’t exactly everything. Still, Detroit’s floor remains extremely high given this talented core. The challenge will be to complement these superstars with a strong supporting cast, and that’s certainly what Lions general manager Brad Holmes will seek out to do this offseason.
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