I’m not sure what others around the league are watching when they throw on Jonathan Taylor‘s film from the 2024 season. Despite arguably putting up a top-three RB season in the league last year, he still finds himself ranked low in top-10 RB rankings across the league.

 

This time, the disrespect is coming from EA Sports with their upcoming Madden 26 ratings, which have Taylor as the ninth top RB. What makes it worse, though, is that some of the RBs coming ahead of him don’t make any sense at all.

Taylor received an overall rating of 88 for the upcoming Madden 26 game. This has him tied with Kenneth Walker of the Seattle Seahawks as the ninth-highest rated RB, so let’s begin comparing these two backs. Last season, Taylor finished with the fourth most rushing yards in the NFL with 1,431 yards and 11 touchdowns in 14 games, and Walker finished with 573 yards and seven touchdowns in 11 games. This means Taylor finished with 858 more yards and four more rushing touchdowns. If that sounds like players who deserve equal ratings, I think you might be watching something different than football.

Some RBs that I find absolutely puzzling to be rated higher than Richardson on this list are James Cook, Josh Jacobs, and, most importantly, Joe Mixon. The one that shocks me the most is Mixon, who somehow landed sixth on the list with a 91 overall rating, three full overalls higher than Taylor. This happened despite Mixon finishing last season with 415 fewer rushing yards than Taylor, with 1,016, and the same number of rushing touchdowns, 11. They both appeared in 14 games, the biggest difference being Mixon started the year strong but regressed as it went on, whereas Taylor played his best football down the stretch. To share further on that point, Mixon didn’t have a single 100-yard rushing game from Weeks 15 on last year; in fact, he didn’t even score a touchdown in that span. Compared to Taylor, who in that same span averaged 156.75 yards per game and scored six touchdowns. I’d love to see how these players were graded to lead to Mixon earning such a high mark, but it seems pretty apparent that the scale is broken.