With the NFL celebrating its 100th season in 2019, you’re going to see all kinds of top-100 lists to mark the occasion. This one is a little different.

Recently, I compiled 14 different lists of the 11 best players at every position. And of those names, I then compiled this list of the top 100 players in the NFL today. In this top 100, I forced myself to stick to players I had named in the positional lists, to avoid overdoing “skill position players” at the expense of slot cornerbacks, guards and interior defensive linemen. By drawing from a full list of positions as opposed to loading this with the most popular or highest-paid players, hopefully it gives a better and wider sense of the talent around the league than some other lists might.

The Top 100: 100-91 | 90-81 | 80-71 | 70-61 | 60-51 | 50-41 | 40-31 | 30-21 | 20-11 | 10-1

That said, this policy made for some weird decisions. Because when you limit yourself to the top 11 players at any position, you’re invariably going to leave some players out who deserve to be in. What if there are three or four really great slot cornerbacks, and 14 to 15 really great quarterbacks? You still have to leave Cam Newton off the list, which seems odd. Or, if DeForest Buckner doesn’t make your top 11 in a league where the group of interior defensive linemen is absolutely stacked, you have to omit him, too. Not ideal.

But as they say, perfect is the enemy of good, and I wanted to stick with this particular paradigm. So, there are quite a few honorable mentions who didn’t make it, but certainly would have if the list were 10 to 20 players longer.

Adam Thielen, DeForest Buckner, Laremy Tunsil, Cam Newton, Kevin Zeitler, Deion Jones, David Johnson, Damon Harrison, Danielle Hunter, Ryan Ramczyk, Dak Prescott, Jake Matthews, Jadeveon Clowney, Brandon Williams, Byron Jones, Telvin Smith, JuJu Smith-Schuster, Joel Bitonio and Frank Clark are among the players who just missed the cut. This should in no way be seen as me maligning their value as players … it’s just that there are only so many slots for any of these guys.

So, here are the ones who did make the cut. Here are my top 100 players heading into the 2019 NFL season.