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Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

Who is the best player in the NFL? Not based on the last 10 years or one game, but over the last year: Who was the best? Good luck answering that one without starting a fight, right?

Well, that's what the NFL 1000 aims to do by scouting, grading and then ranking the best players at each position before putting them in order and breaking ties to come up with the top 1,000 players. No narratives, no fantasy football points, no quarterback rating: This is cold, hard scouting.

You can find rankings for all other positions on our B/R NFL 1000 main page.

The B/R 1000 metric is based heavily on scouting each player and grading the key criteria for each position. The criteria are weighed according to importance for a possible best score of 100.

Potential is not taken into consideration, nor are career accomplishments.

Outside linebackers have many responsibilities—and those vary depending on the individual scheme. With that in mind, linebackers are judged on run defense (20 points), pass rush (20), coverage (20) and tackling (35), plus five points for their value as starters or backups. In that category, we're looking at whether the player is a consistent starter, a spot starter, a top-level backup or simply a backup-only player.

In the case of ties, our team asked, "Which player would I rather have on my team?" and set the rankings accordingly.

Subjective? Yes. But ties are no fun.

Each player was scouted by me and a team of experienced evaluators (Dan Bazal, Cian Fahey, Dan Hope, Marshal Miller, Justis Mosqueda) with these key criteria in mind. The following scouting reports and grades are the work of months of film study from our team.

All statistics from Pro Football Focus. Players' heights, weights and seasons played from NFL.com.