NFL Power Rankings 2026: The Rams Top All 32 — and Myles Garrett Is the Reason

Every preseason the same exercise runs, and every preseason it hardens into a verdict: rank all 32 rosters, unit by unit, and the Los Angeles Rams finish on top of almost every list. NFL.com has them first. ESPN has them first. The after-preseason polls have them first. What the consensus keeps crediting is the offense — a quarterback coming off the best year of his career, a receiver room that keeps coordinators awake. That reading is comfortable, and it points at the wrong thing.

The Rams are No. 1 because of a defense that can finally dictate. And a defense dictates when one man on the edge forces everyone else to account for him first.

Install a rusher good enough to wreck a pocket without help, and the whole design reorganizes around that fact. You can rush four and drop seven, so your coverage stops gambling. You can keep your blitzes holstered instead of spending them, so third down stops being a coin flip. You can disguise, because you no longer need bodies to make a passer uncomfortable — you need one. That is the line between a defense that answers an offense and a defense that sets the terms of the down. For a decade the Rams had that kind of player inside, at tackle. Now they have it on the edge, where the geometry is crueler: pressure off the outside bends a pocket toward the blind side, the one direction a quarterback cannot see it coming.

The player is Myles Garrett, and the way he arrived is the tell. He did not fall into Los Angeles; he asked to leave Cleveland, a club that spent his prime rotating quarterbacks and finishing near the floor of these same rankings — dead last on some 2026 lists as this is written. “The goal was never to go from Cleveland to Canton,” he said when he requested out. “It has always been to compete and win the Super Bowl.” Garrett is the reigning Defensive Player of the Year, a two-time winner who set the league’s single-season sack record last season. Players like that essentially never move: by the Elias Sports Bureau’s count he is only the third reigning Defensive Player of the Year to switch teams the next year. He engineered the rarest trade in the sport to get the one thing his old club could not build — a system already good enough to turn his disruption into January leverage.

This is where the list runs ahead of the football. A defense organized around a single keystone is only as available as the keystone, and Garrett missed a real chunk of training camp with a knee problem — which means the exact mechanism the No. 1 ranking depends on has barely been tested inside this scheme. The Aaron Donald comeback that keeps resurfacing in the coverage is, for now, a rumor doing a lineman’s work, filling a gap that may not close. Rankings grade the roster on paper. They cannot grade whether a design has had enough live snaps to hold when the pocket is real and the game is fast.

The price tells you how sure Los Angeles was. To pry Garrett loose at the start of June, the Rams sent Cleveland their own ascending young edge, Jared Verse, plus a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second and a 2029 third — the kind of haul a team surrenders only when it believes it is one player from finishing. It helps that the Super Bowl this season is scheduled in the Rams’ own building, which converts a strong roster into an organizational deadline.

So read the rankings, but read them right. The Rams are not first because they can score. They are first because, for the first time in years, they get to decide how the other team is allowed to — and that entire premise now rests on one knee.

Tags: NFL, Los Angeles Rams, Myles Garrett, Cleveland Browns, power rankings