PFF Awards 2025: Myles Garrett wins Dwight Stephenson Award

• The NFL’s Best Player Overall: The PFF Dwight Stephenson Award, named after the former Miami Dolphins great, is presented annually to the NFL’s best player regardless of position. This year’s winner is Myles Garrett, the league’s highest-rated defensive player and pass rusher extraordinaire.

• A new pocket king is just around the corner: Garrett broke the NFL record for sacks in a season by recording his 23rd of the year in Week 18. That performance and his fifth straight PFF grade above 90.0 on the season make him one of the NFL’s best to ever do it.

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The PFF Dwight Stephenson Award, named after the former Miami Dolphins great, is presented annually to the NFL’s best player regardless of position.

This year’s winner led all defenders in both the PFF overall grade and the PFF pass-rush grade: Cleveland Browns edge defender Myles Garrett.

Garrett earned his fifth consecutive PFF overall season-high grade above 90.0 in 2025. He has finished first among all qualifying defensive players overall in PFF in every season since 2022, after finishing second in 2021 (92.1), behind Aaron Donald.

The 2017 first overall pick has been elite since the moment he stepped onto an NFL field, and the ultra-dominant stretch he’s had in the 2020s culminated in him breaking the NFL’s sack record in 2025.

Despite facing double teams at an absurd pace On the season, Garrett posted a league-leading 93.3 PFF pass-rush grade. PFF’s 0-100 grades are derived from a play-by-play grading process, where we grade each snap using a detailed rubric on film. That process allows us to group all pass-rush wins, and to distinguish between different types of wins: whether a rusher beats an offensive lineman cleanly, wins late on a counter move, a lineman runs back to push the pocket, and so on.

When these weights were applied to all pass-rush replays, Garrett’s weighted positive rating of 21.3% led all defenders. He was one of only two players (Micah Parsons) to reach the 20.0% threshold. The league is chock full of elite pass-rush talent, especially on the perimeter where multiple players can take over a game. However, Garrett continues to operate on his own level.

Since the start of the 2022 season, Garrett owns a 95.6 PFF overall grade, the best in the league. At just 30 years old, he has a career PFF grade of 95.3 on 7,010 defensive snaps. Fresh off an NFL sack record, we may have just witnessed one of the greatest players ever deliver the best season of his career to date.