CFB Rank 2024: Ranking the top 100 players before the season - ESPN

It's an odd season for big names in college football. There are some known commodities, of course — Travis Hunter, Carson Beck, Ollie Gordon II, for example — but there are relatively few established superstars. Just two of the top 10 in last year's Heisman Trophy voting return for 2024. Just four of the 25 players to earn consensus All-America status last year are back this season. Last year's national champs, Michigan, sent 13 players to the NFL draft. There's simply a vacuum of stardom waiting to be filled.

That makes the job of ranking the 100 best players particularly difficult. Quarterback is the most important position on the field, but this year's crop is a bit thin. There are some elite pass rushers, but that's a narrow skill set to take the top spot. There's a reasonable case for at least seven or eight players to be ranked No. 1 overall — and that's before we even get to the next 99 spots.

But we don't rank the top 100 players because it's easy. We do it because it's hard. And also because it's fun to debate the relative merits of a 330-pound offensive lineman and a corner with 4.3 speed. — David Hale

Methodology: To compile this year's list, we utilized a panel of ESPN experts — David Hale, Adam Rittenberg, Bill Connelly, Chris Low and Paolo Uggetti — and went through four rounds of voting to select a pool of players worthy of consideration. They considered players' past contributions on the field, along with their anticipated roles for 2024, their recruiting pedigrees and their draft stocks, and formulated a reasonable expectation for this coming season. Then they debated, argued and discussed (and possibly played a few rounds of rock paper scissors as a tiebreaker) to put them in order, 1 through 100.

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