The Top 25 D-I Men’s College Players 2022 (Part 2: #11-25)

Which top players are being over- or undervalued across the wide range of perspectives?

April 25, 2022 by Ultiworld in Opinion with 0 comments

College ultimate is filled with stars. Some play in high-profile environments, get reps for elite club teams, or play in international competition. Others compete with deep squads that don’t always make them the headliner for their team. Still others ply their trade for off-the-radar programs that dim their limelight. But our coverage team tries to see them all.

So who are the best players in college ultimate right now? To try to clear away as much of the white noise created by circumstance as possible and get to the heart of each individual’s value and contribution, we asked members of our coverage team to weigh in on the following prompt:

If you were starting a college team right after the end of the regular season, with the express goal of winning a hypothetical 2022 College Championships still scheduled for Memorial Day weekend, how would you rank the players within the division? You aren’t building a team of all your selections, so don’t worry about how the players complement each other. Consider each pick the first pick of a team, drafting in order, only you can’t pick the players you’ve already ranked above. All current D-I players are eligible to be drafted, but with their current injury status.

Our process was altered this year in order to improve how representative our rankings are of the opinions of our voters. We each listed out our top 35 players — up from a cap of 25 in past years — to iron out some of the gradations on the fringes and then combined our lists to create a composite ranking. In addition, we included the ballots of a few anonymous elite players from different regions. We used a weighted scoring system for votes, with Players’ Ballots counting as 60% of the value of Staff Ballots.¹

Here’s our top 10. Our full top 25, as well as every player receiving votes, will be available in a second article for our subscribers on Monday.

In our first article in this series, we discussed the top 10 players in our aggregated rankings. Now, here’s how the rest of our top 25, our full voting breakdown — including point totals, to be used to get a sense of the size of the gaps between players — and our discussion of the players listed there:

1. Our experience has shown that players’ ballots trend towards regional concentrations and emphasizing the strength of their teammates, as well as other quirks such as occasionally not ranking themselves, which is why their ballots are weighted in this manner. ↩