Tetairoa McMillan has another line for his young résumé. The Panthers receiver was voted the 87th-best player in the league on the NFL Top 100 for 2026, a rare nod for a player just one year into his career. When the league unveiled the ranking at the end of June, the recognition did not seem to move him much.
That reaction tracks with how McMillan has carried himself. With more than 1,000 players in the NFL, cracking the top 100 after a single season is a genuine marker, but he waved it off when asked, telling reporters, “I feel like that’s regular.” To hear him tell it, the honor simply followed from the bigger goal he set when he arrived in Charlotte.
The credentials behind the ranking are hard to argue with. The No. 8 overall pick in the 2025 draft out of Arizona, McMillan swept the major rookie honors, taking the AP Offensive Rookie of the Year award along with the Pro Football Writers of America’s Rookie and Offensive Rookie of the Year recognition. He became the first Panther to win Rookie of the Year since Cam Newton in 2011, and quarterback Bryce Young saw it coming, saying of his top target, “he was elite; he’s a special player.”
The production made the case on its own. McMillan caught 70 passes for 1,014 yards and seven touchdowns, the most receiving scores by any rookie in the league last season, and he started all 17 games. Per the team, he played more than 87 percent of Carolina’s offensive snaps and accounted for over 20 percent of the offense’s output, the highest share of any non-quarterback among the award’s finalists, as the Panthers returned to the playoffs for the first time since 2017.
