The Green Bay Packers have remade much of their roster this offseason, but the back end of their defense still starts with the same name. Safety Xavier McKinney again ranks as the NFL’s third-best at the position in ESPN’s annual survey of league executives, coaches and scouts, holding the exact spot he occupied a year ago.
Only Baltimore’s Kyle Hamilton and the Los Angeles Chargers’ Derwin James Jr. finished ahead of him in Jeremy Fowler’s polling, and the praise from the people who game-plan against him was pointed. “He sees the game very quickly. Fast processor,” an AFC coach said. “He is always in a great position and plays the game in control. He can tackle, he can cover, and he gets the ball.”
Fowler’s own evaluation leaned on the coverage numbers. “McKinney’s game is among the most refined in the safety field,” he wrote, noting that McKinney held opposing quarterbacks to a 54.7 passer rating when targeted in 2025, allowing 15 receptions for 172 yards on 29 targets. His interception total fell from a career-high eight in 2024 — the season that earned him first-team All-Pro honors — to two last year, but the disruption stayed. He broke up 10 passes for a 34.5% ball-hawk rate, first among safeties with at least 400 coverage snaps, per NFL Next Gen Stats. Across his first two seasons in Green Bay, he has not allowed a touchdown as the nearest defender.
That is the return on the four-year, $68 million deal the Packers handed McKinney in 2024 after four seasons with the New York Giants, a contract that briefly made him one of the highest-paid safeties in the league and has looked like a bargain since. At 27, he sits squarely in his prime.
The ranking was not unanimous — Fowler noted some voters slotted McKinney as low as seventh — and NFL.com’s separate Top 100 dropped him 40 spots to No. 70, a reminder that the interception dip caught some eyes. But the coaches and scouts who see him twice a year were not swayed. As Green Bay leans on a younger, reshuffled core in 2026, the one part of the defense the Packers do not have to solve is the deepest man on the field.
