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 given annually to the NFL's best player, regardless of position. This year's winner is Myles Garrett — the league's highest-graded defender and pass rusher extraordinaire.

• A new sack king is upon us: Garrett broke the NFL record for sacks in a season by logging his 23rd of the year in Week 18. That feat and his fifth consecutive 90.0-plus season-long PFF overall grade make him one of the NFL's best ever to do it.

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

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

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

The 2017 first overall pick has been elite since the moment he stepped onto an NFL field, and the utterly dominant stretch he’s been on throughout the 2020s culminated in his breaking the NFL’s single-season sack record in 2025.

Despite facing double teams at an absurd rate throughout 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, in which we grade every snap using a detailed rubric on the film. That process allows us to group all pass-rush wins, as well as distinguish between different types of wins: whether a rusher is beating an offensive lineman cleanly off the snap, winning late with a counter move, walking a lineman back to push the pocket, and so on.

When applying those weights across all pass-rush reps, Garrett’s weighted positive grade rate of 21.3% led all defenders. He was one of just two players (Micah Parsons) to clear the 20.0% threshold. The league is flush with elite pass-rushing talent, particularly along the edge, where multiple players are capable of taking over a game. Garrett, however, continues to operate on a level of his own.

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