Who are the best players in college football?

It’s a massive project and undertaking, one that involved hours of conference calls and tweaking and retweaking of the rankings until we felt they best represented our answer to that question. While some lists go to 50, or even 100, our list, to paraphrase Spinal Tap, goes to 247.

LINK: College Football Top247

When 247Sports analysts and college writers elected to move forward with our rankings, it began a month-long process of pre-ranking to come up with more than 300 names. That was followed by several days where analysts, spread out throughout the country and with different areas of expertise, met on conference calls to debate the merits of SEC linebacker A versus Pac-12 receiver B.

But this was much more than five or so people deciding the fate of the list. To make decisions on how to separate close players on the same team, 247Sports team site publishers and reporters were called. In some cases, we called players’ coaches, or other coaches within their conferences to help separate players. In short, it takes a village to make this kind of list.

What qualifications did we use to make the list?

1. We were looking for the best player.

2. Yes, production matters. But production was probably secondary to …

3. Ability. Ability is a nebulous term that is defined in different ways by different people. But if you see a running back who had 800 yards last year ahead of one who had 1,200, chances are, we just thought Player A had more ability.

4. Position matters. All things being equal, take the left tackle over the guard.

And there was probably a draft aspect to it. Not necessarily the pure “is this guy a better NFL prospect” conversation, but rather a discussion through the lens of a potential college draft. The question became: “If you’re building a college team, would you take this guy high?” There’s certainly a difference between the two. TCU quarterback Trevone Boykin, for instance, doesn’t project as a top NFL draft pick. But when building a college offense, the athletic Boykin with a rocket for an arm would be an outstanding primary building block.

Link: Five Likely Arguments

Not only were players ranked from 1 through 247, but we also assigned a number to them, similar to the way we’ve evaluated recruits. This lets you know which players are in the same tier — in some cases, the drop off between two players 50 spots apart was fairly minimal. Like we do for our recruiting rankings, 32 players received a five-star designation.

Heading in, most of us thought we’d be scraping the bottom of the barrel for the final few picks. But in college football, with 128 FBS teams, that just wasn’t the case. There were 1,000-yard backs and wide receivers who didn’t make the cut … some from Power 5 Conference schools.

Link: The Ultimate Conference Breakdown

We elected to leave off players who haven’t played at this level, so junior college players, and freshmen, both true and redshirt, were left off the list. Will some of them wind up on the midseason and postseason version of this list? Without a doubt. But it’s hard to reward them at this point when they haven’t proven anything between the lines on an FBS field.

Link: The Master Watch List

There’s never a pure consensus when making a list like this. Some people had Player A higher. Others had him lower. In some cases, there were pretty significant gaps in opinion when making the room. But the end result is a labor of love, a list that we think stands up to the challenge of identifying the Top 247 players in the country.

College Football Top247