A projected Top 100 is a list of guesses wearing a very serious suit, and I would not trade it for anything. ESPN put out its projected Top 100 for the 2026 season this week, four Chicago Bears made the cut, and somewhere a person who has never met a Bears fan is about to learn what that does to a comment section. Good. That is the whole point.
I love this list precisely because it cannot be right. Nobody has played a snap that counts. Every name on it is a prediction dressed up as a ranking, which means it is really a document about belief: who we think is about to be great, not who already was. That is a harder and more honest thing than a year-end list, and it takes more nerve to publish.
Why does the projected Top 100 matter if nobody has played a game?
Because the math is brutal and the math is the argument. Run it out and the list is thinner than it feels.
| The arithmetic of a Top 100 | Number |
|---|---|
| Spots on the list | 100 |
| NFL teams | 32 |
| Proportional share, per team | 3.1 |
| Bears on ESPN's projection | 4 |
| Active roster, per team | 53 |
Thirty-two rosters of fifty-three, and a hundred chairs. A perfectly even split gives every franchise a hair over three names. Chicago got four. That is not a coronation and it is not a scandal. It is a publication saying, out loud and in advance, that this roster has crossed from interesting to good, and putting its name on that claim before the evidence arrives. Say it in January and it costs you nothing. Say it in September and you own it.
I do not have the four names in front of me yet, and I am not going to guess at them to fill a paragraph. What I can tell you is what four means. Four is the number a team carries when the talent has stopped being a story about potential.
What the list gets wrong, every single year
Here is my honest counterpoint, and I think it is a real one. Preseason lists are systematically unfair to the guy who is about to have the year of his life. They reward the known name. Voters and analysts alike are anchored to last season's tape, so the list is always a little behind the sport it is trying to describe. Every autumn produces two or three players who spend December making a summer ranking look silly, and no projection has ever caught them in advance. That is not a flaw in the methodology. That is football.
checked the almanac: the players' own Top 100 has been an offseason ritual on NFL Network since 2011, and the fun of it was never the accuracy. it was watching a left tackle explain, on camera, why a defensive end he has to block twice a year was ranked too low.
Chicago is the right team to test this on
The Bears are a franchise that has historically been defined by defenses and by singular, unmistakable players rather than by depth of stars. The 1985 team is still the reference point in that city forty years on, and it is the reference point because everybody could name the guys. That is the standard Chicago measures against, fairly or not.
So a projected Top 100 with four Bears on it is a small, specific claim against a very large history. It says the names are back. Whether it holds up is a seventeen-week question, and the seventeen weeks are the fun part.
What I'm watching next
I want the December version of this list next to the September one. Not to dunk on anybody, but because the gap between the two is the most interesting document in football: it tells you exactly where the collective eye was wrong and how long it stayed wrong. I keep those. Nothing deleted, nothing cherry-picked, including my own bad reads.
And I want the argument. A list that nobody fights about is a list nobody needed. This one already has four Bears in it, a proportional share of three, and a country full of people who think their guy got robbed. That is not noise. That is the sport talking to itself in early September, for the love of the game, before a single result exists to settle anything.