2024 Best NFL cornerbacks: Sauce Gardner, Patrick Surtain Jr. lead rankings

Training camps have reached the dog days, preseason is underway and Week 1 is arriving soon, so it's time to roll out our annual NFL positional rankings.

Last week we started off with off-ball linebackers, and now we'll dive into cornerbacks. Members of the FOX Sports NFL staff listed their 10 best in order heading into the 2024 season. A first-place vote merited 10 points in our methodology and descended from there, down to a single point for 10th place. We then combined the scores to determine our rankings. 

While this year's linebacker list saw nine players from 2023 make it again, cornerbacks was a completely different story, with only four from last year's rankings making it again this year.

New York's Ahmad "Sauce" Gardner and Denver's Patrick Surtain Jr. finished in the top two in six of our seven writer ballots, with Gardner in first in four rankings and Surtain taking the top spot in two.

This position is also dominated by younger players, as six of the top 10 are 25 years old or younger — Gardner, Surtain Jr., Jaylon Johnson, Trent McDuffie, DaRon Bland, and Devon Witherspoon. 

We'll continue to roll out the best players at other positions between now and the start of the season. For now, here are the NFL's best cornerbacks.

Henry McKenna: The NFL is a quarterback league — not a cornerback league. But it says something that the Jets — with their ongoing quarterback disaster (See: Wilson, Zach) — have finished 7-10 in the last two seasons. Those wins are a credit to the defense in which Gardner might just be the centerpiece, even more important than Quinnen Williams, C.J. Mosley and Quincy Williams.

Gardner finished his 2023 season with 51 targets. He allowed 29 catches for 251 yards and one touchdown, according