If you want to create a spreadsheet that will show you how your NFL team players rank compared to other league players this post can be a useful way to do so. It provides a overall worksheet on all active players in the NFL that have started at least one game over the last four seasons. From this worksheet of all the players it is relatively easy to create one specifically for your team.
The spreadsheet uses the metric of Approximate Value (AV) produced by the site Pro Football Reference. This metric attempts to put a single number on the seasonal value of a player at any position from any year (since 1960). You can read about this metric at Pro Football Reference Page on AV.
In the speadsheet is a team sheet already created for the Giants if you want to see what it would look like. To create your team sheet download the spreadsheet found here – AV per Snaps. The steps are as follows.
- Working on the sheet called “All”, select the sheet and filter on the field Team that contains the abbreviation name of your team. For example “ARI” for the Arizona Cardinals. If you use the drop down to set the team select the entry that is only the single team acronym and not one that lists multiple acronyms.
- While still selecting the filtered workheet copy the worksheet and open a new worksheet and paste the copied filtered list into it.
- This is all the active players that have started at least one game over the last four years and that are or were on your team at some point in that timeframe.
- What I did next was go to Pro Football Reference page on your team’s 2025 roster. For example with the Cardinals it would be Cardinal’s 2025 roster. Export the Current Roster as an Excel Workbook. Then open the file and sort that roster on Player Name ascending. Leave that open as a half screen.
- Go back to your created spreadsheet on your team and sort the worksheet on Player ascending. Have that open as a half screen.
- Go down the Team roster spreadsheet and in your spreadsheet highlight the players listed on the Roster spreadsheet. I used a background color. This gives your current players highlighted.
- You can leave like that or do as I did and reverse the highlight when all thru the list to grey out the players that are no longer on the team.
This gives you the team with a color coded number that corresponds to where they rank among 1,828 active players. It also shows players that your team had and moved on from and how they did in the previous four years. It is a good indicator of whether you are losing good players or parting with poor ones.
I used four years to give a better picture than relying on only 2025 for cases when a good player was injured or had a down year. But not too far back so that I was looking at a player that no longer was like the current player. The worksheet is sorted by AV per snaps. This was in order to not have too much influence from simply playing a lot. As sometimes poor players get significant playing time due to injuries or just a poor roster for that position.
Here is what the created spreadsheet would look like. This was for the NYG.
Featured image: James Cook (#4) lining up in the backfield for Buffalo. Cook is the top player in the spreadsheet that played in 2025.