American football hands out two big MVP awards every season, and when I started watching I filed them together as much the same thing. There is the Super Bowl MVP, for the standout of the final, and the season MVP, the league-wide award for the best player across the whole year. Both usually go to a quarterback, so I assumed they behaved the same way. They actually don’t, and the season award is a far tighter quarterback lock than the Super Bowl one.
The Super Bowl MVP has roughly gone to a quarterback a little over half the time. The season MVP, in the modern game, goes to one almost every single year.
The Super Bowl version at least can throw a surprise
A running back won the Super Bowl MVP this year, Kenneth Walker III, the first at his position since 1998, and a defensive player sneaks in now and then. I wrote about how quarterback-heavy that award is here, but set beside the season MVP it looks almost broad-minded.
The season award barely moves. A quarterback has won it every single year since 2012. The last player at any other position to take it was the running back Adrian Peterson, that same year. The reigning winner, announced in February, is Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford.
No defenders, and not a single receiver named as MVP
Go right back to the start, in 1957, and the pattern is clearer still. Only two defensive players have ever won it. Alan Page took it in 1971, Lawrence Taylor in 1986, and no defender has come close since.
No wide receiver has ever won it, not even Jerry Rice, who had a decent claim to being the finest player the sport has produced. The winner is decided by a panel of fifty sportswriters at the end of the regular season, a similar media vote to the Super Bowl award but a far narrower result.
Why the season MVP award is typecast
The difference comes down to one game against a whole season. A single Super Bowl can be hijacked by one player, a running back who goes for 150 yards, a pass-rusher who lives in the backfield all night.
Across seventeen regular-season games, that noise averages out, and what is left standing is the quarterback, who touches the ball on nearly every snap and steers nearly every drive.
Over a full year, it’s very hard to argue the best quarterback isn’t also the most valuable player, which is exactly what the counting stats reward. So the voters rarely bother arguing.
With a new season just under way and the MVP talk already loud, here is a prediction that costs me nothing to make. Whoever wins it, they will be a quarterback.
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