The NFL’s Top 100 Players of 2026 list put Jeffery Simmons 83rd. Pro Football Network’s ranking has him 19th. Those two numbers can’t both be right, and the gap says plenty about how badly interior defenders get overlooked.
The Numbers Behind a No. 83 That Doesn’t Compute
Football Debate Club analyst Ian Cummings has no patience for the peer vote. “Respectfully, that 83rd ranking is a travesty, and a lot of people need to know just how good Simmons was in 2025,” Cummings said. The case isn’t hard to make. The tape and the box score point the same direction.
Simmons led every defensive tackle in football in sacks (11) and tackles for loss (17) last season, both career highs, and added a personal-best 21 quarterback hits with three forced fumbles. He did it in 15 games, missing two, on a Titans team that finished 3-14. By NFL scoring, he also led all defensive tackles with 60 pressures. That production earned him his first First-Team All-Pro selection and stamped him as the most disruptive interior defender in football last season.
PFN’s metrics push the argument further. Simmons posted a DT impact score of 97.2 that, per the outlet, led the league by a wide margin. “That was the best in the league by almost 10 full points,” Cummings said. “Not only that, but it was the 12th best score of all time, dating back to 1999.” By PFN’s disruptive EPA measure, he ranked first among all defensive tackles.
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None of that reads like the 83rd-best player in the sport. It reads like a top-20 one, which is exactly where PFN slotted him.
Why Simmons Belongs in the Best-Defender Conversation
What separates Simmons isn’t one skill. He wins from everywhere along the line. “Turn on the film, you’ll see him taking reps from 1-tech, 3-tech, [4- and 5-tech], and 7-tech,” Cummings said, calling him “an alignment versatile chaos bringer and power producer” with elite explosion and an unhinged motor.
That versatility is why Cummings won’t cap the ceiling at very good. “Going off of his 2025 film and numbers, there’s an argument to make he’s closer to being the best defensive player in the NFL, period, than he is to being a fringe top 100 player,” he said.
The context around him is trending up. Simmons just became the highest-paid interior defender in league history, and Tennessee hired defensive-minded head coach Robert Saleh, whose track record includes nine top-10 defenses. A sharper scheme and stronger surrounding talent should mean cleaner looks and fewer double teams. “With the improvements on the Titans defense, his reign of dominance is likely to extend,” Cummings said.
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Simmons turns 29 before the season, which is nothing for an interior lineman whose game runs on power and technique rather than pure burst. The peer vote saw a losing record and moved on. The film saw one of the most disruptive defenders in football. One of those reads aged poorly the moment it published, and it wasn’t the one that had him in the top 20.
