Black Monday and the NFL MVP

Black Monday

We saw a strangely quiet Black Monday, with only four coaches being fired (or mutually agreeing to go separate ways, in the case of Jim Harbaugh). Counting Oakland there are only five open coaching positions this offseason. Here are my thoughts on the four firings from Monday.
 
Fired:

New York Jets

The Jets fired both head coach Rex Ryan and GM John Idzik on Monday. For Ryan, the writing has been on the wall for a long time. If anything it was a surprise that he made it through last season. The Jets have gotten worse every year since he’s been the head coach, both on offense and on defense. Their offensive struggles have gotten most of the blame, but they have steadily declined on the other side of the ball as well. Here are the Jets defensive ranks in DVOA during the six years with Ryan as coach: 1, 5, 2, 9, 12, 21. They have not invested in offense, and they have failed to develop highly drafted defensive players like Quinton Coples.

The firing of Idzik was a bit unfair, but I understand the desire to start over from scratch. They want to bring in a new GM, a new coach, and a new quarterback and mark 2015 as a completely fresh start. Idzik actually did a good job drafting in 2013 and picking up useful veterans like Eric Decker and Chris Ivory. But the Geno Smith pick doomed him, as all failed quarterback picks eventually do.

Atlanta Falcons

I am not going to argue against the firing of head coach Mike Smith. After years of playoff disappointment followed by a disaster of a season in 2013, it was clear that he needed to make the playoffs if he was going to keep his job. As the NFC South collapsed around him the road to the playoffs only became easier, but he still wasn’t able to lead the Falcons to the division title. At least twice this year he cost his team an almost certain victory with idiotic clock management, and nothing he tried over the past two seasons did anything to fix the problems assailing their defense. Mike Smith had to go, and the Falcons had to start over.

The one thing I can’t understand is the decision to retain GM Thomas Dimitroff. Dimitroff arrived the same year Smith did, and he deserves just as much credit for their early success and just as much blame for their recent failures. He repeatedly traded assets away to move up in the draft, and because of his moves the team was left bare of talent at most positions. If anything he deserves more of the blame than Smith for the past two seasons. If the Falcons wanted to start fresh, they should have begun at the top of their organization.

Chicago Bears

Three years. That is, in my mind, the minimum time a coach deserves to attempt to demonstrate his value. The only possible exceptions that come to mind are in extreme cases, such as a Greg Schiano level sociopath. Trestman does not fall into this category. The season was a disaster in Chicago, and they probably needed to fire their defensive coordinator. After the drama involving the leaked Jay Cutler information, they probably needed to move on from their offensive coordinator too. But it is completely unfair to dismiss Trestman after two seasons, one of which was actually worthy of being called a success.

Trestman inherited a team in a bad situation. Their defense was built around an aging core of Julius Peppers, Lance Briggs, and Charles Tillman. The closest they had to young talent was Shea McClellin. Years of poor trades and drafting under former GM Jerry Angelo left him with very little to work with. The fact that they nearly won the NFC North in 2013 despite crippling injuries on defense and the loss of their starting quarterback was a minor miracle. As bad as 2014 was, it doesn’t change that. One good year and one bad year should not be enough to get a coach fired.

San Francisco 49ers

I cannot express how stupid this whole thing was. Jim Harbaugh is one of the best football coaches in the world. Everywhere he has gone he has made the team immediately better. Stanford was 1-11 the year before he arrived. He left them as a top ten team in the nation. San Francisco won 46 games in the eight years prior to his arrival. Counting playoffs, they won 49 games in his four seasons. I can’t speak to the specifics of any internal strife, but if there were problems in the organization they should have found a way to fix them other than jettisoning one of the top coaches in the league. The 49ers are on a definite downward trajectory, and I wouldn’t be stunned to see them end up with a top ten pick in 2016, just as they had the year before Harbaugh arrived.

Retained:

There were a few other coaches who looked like they might be let go, but so far most have managed to hang on. A couple of these could still lose their jobs, but it seems likely that they'll all be given another year.

 

Miami Dolphins

The Dolphins announced last week that Joe Philbin would be staying for at least the 2015 season. As much as this was a vote of confidence in Philbin, it struck me more as a vote of confidence in Ryan Tannehill. This was by far Tannehill’s best season, but he is still far from a long term solution at quarterback. He needs to take another step forward next season. If he doesn’t, they will have to part ways with him. The Dolphins retained Philbin to maintain continuity and to give them flexibility to start from scratch in 2016 if things don't work out next year.

St Louis Rams

Of the coaches who were fired, Smith and Ryan were probably the only two that deserved it. Of the coaches who weren’t fired, I can think of only one who deserved to be let go. Jeff Fisher is far and away the most overrated coach in the NFL. He is highly respected among NFL circles, meaning no one in the media ever says a bad thing about him, meaning most people seem unaware that he is not really that good as a coach. In nineteen full seasons as a head coach he has finished over .500 six times. His gift is the ability to be consistently mediocre. In eleven of those seasons he finished with between six or eight wins, meaning only twice did he finish with five or fewer wins.

And sure enough, his three years in St Louis have seen him go 7-8-1, 7-9, 6-10. In that time the Rams have utterly failed to develop the wealth of young talent they received from the RGIII trade, have made questionable decisions hiring coordinators, and don’t seem to be able to do anything other than pull an occasional upset to trick people into believing they’re better than they actually are. St Louis needs to make a change now, while they still have a chance to harness the potential of players like Tavon Austin and Michael Brockers.

Washington Redskins

Remember above when I said that there are very few cases where a coach should be fired after two years? This holds doubly true for a single season. 2014 was a disaster in Washington, and Jay Gruden looked hopeless as he tried to manage the countless calamities unfolding around him. Dan Snyder at the helm means that anything is possible, and there was plenty of speculation that Gruden could be on his way out, especially if he wasn’t willing to support Robert Griffin as the long term answer at quarterback. Right now it looks like Gruden will be back next year, for better or for worse. He definitely deserves another chance, but nothing I saw this year leaves me optimistic for his coaching tenure.

Jacksonville Jaguars

I don’t have much to say on this one. A smart decision to retain Gus Bradley, even if I’m not sure how long he’ll last in Jacksonville. I think he’s a good coach, but this team still looks a long way from competing for playoffs. For him to last they’ll need to win seven or eight games next year then make the postseason in 2016. He will go as far as Blake Bortles will carry him, which has to be a bit nerve wracking after this season.

Buffalo Bills

Before the season I called Doug Marrone the most likely coach to end up fired. I was wrong about this (and quite a few other things too, which I’ll get to in a couple weeks). The Bills surprised everyone by pulling out a 9-7 record this season, covering for the personality conflicts caused by their coach early in the season. Of course, this will all go away when they start losing again next year. The Bills had a good season, but they are a team built around an aging core of Fred Jackson, Mario Williams, and Kyle Williams. With no clear options at quarterback, next year will be a disappointment and Marrone will likely be on his way out.

MVP

I normally don’t care much about end of season awards. I find them mildly amusing, and I will occasionally get indignant if the voters get things completely wrong. But I don’t see much reason to waste a lot of time thinking about and writing about the winners of these awards. If you’re really that interested, here’s who I think should win the major awards.

Offensive Rookie: Odell Beckham Jr

Defensive Rookie: Aaron Donald

Coach of the Year: Bruce Arians

Comeback Player: Julio Jones

Defensive Player: JJ Watt

Offensive Player: I’m honestly not even sure what this award is supposed to mean. Antonio Brown, I guess.

You’ll notice that I left one award out, the biggest of them all. That’s because this year we are looking at one of the most interesting and most wide open MVP fields in history, at least in my mind. Aaron Rodgers is the presumed winner, and he certainly has put together a fantastic season in leading the Packers to a division title and a first round bye. But I don’t want to just leave it at that. I want to look a little closer.

Before any discussion about MVP, I think it’s important to define how we interpret “Most Valuable Player”. I’m not someone who gets caught up too much in the word “valuable”. I think when MVP awards were first handed out it was constructed this way to make it sound more prestigious than simply saying “Best Player”. I think it’s more an accident of history that we give so much importance to the word valuable, and I think the award should go to whichever player puts together the best season. Getting caught up in the word valuable leads to facile arguments such as Nick Foles deserving the award because the team collapsed without him, or Andrew Luck because the Colts have so little outside of him.

I do think there should be one condition on a player being eligible for MVP. A team shouldn’t have to make the playoffs for one of its players to win the award, but it should be competitive down the stretch. I don’t think the award should go to a player who piles up great stats in meaningless games. If a team is alive in the final week of the season, if every game a player plays is crucial to a playoff run, then I don’t see why we should dismiss his performance just because a game here or there did not go his way.

To discuss the MVP we need to start by looking at the quarterback position. No one will dispute that this is the most important position on the field, and if a quarterback stands head and shoulders above the other players at his positions then he deserves to win the award. Most people seem to agree right now that Aaron Rodgers has done this, but I don’t think it’s that clear cut. Below I’ve listed the stats of the five best quarterbacks in the league this season. See if you can pick Rodgers from this list.

	Yards	Completion %	Touchdowns	Yards/Attempt	Passer Rating	QBR
A	4952	69.2	33	7.51	97.0	71.6
B	4381	65.6	38	8.43	112.2	82.6
C	4727	66.2	39	7.92	101.5	77.2
D	4952	67.1	32	8.15	103.3	72.5
E	3705	69.9	34	8.52	113.2	82.8

If you’re familiar enough with the stats, you will probably be able to identify everyone on the list. Quarterback A is Drew Brees. Quarterback B is Rodgers. Quarterback C is Peyton Manning. Quarterback D is Ben Roethlisberger. And Quarterback E is Tony Romo.

But the fact remains that, looking at these stats, it is impossible to claim that Rodgers is far and away the best quarterback in the league. The one place that he stands out is interceptions, which I omitted above solely because it would have made it too easy to guess which was Rodgers. He threw only five interceptions this season. The next fewest among quarterbacks to start every game was Russell Wilson with seven. Tom Brady, Roethlisberger, and Romo all had nine. Rodgers was the best at avoiding turnovers (though he did fumble the ball more than any of the other four top quarterbacks), and for that reason I would call him the best quarterback in the league.

But there is absolutely no reason to say that Rodgers was far and away the best in the NFL. He was 2^nd in the league in QBR, 2^nd in quarterback rating, 2^nd in yards per attempt, 3^rd in touchdowns, 7^th in passing yards, and 9^th in completion percentage. His efficiency numbers fall slightly short of Tony Romo’s, and his volume numbers are behind Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck.

Rodgers had a good season this year. But it doesn’t come close to being an all time great season like we saw from Peyton Manning last year or Rodgers himself in 2011. Rodgers’s stats this year are almost identical to those he put up in 2012 when he didn’t even brush the MVP discussion. He was the best quarterback in the NFL this season, but it wasn’t by enough that we just have to ignore the other positions.

So we have to ask ourselves, were there any players who dominated their position groups in the way Rodgers failed to do? Let’s start by looking at running backs. DeMarco Murray blew the competition out of the water in terms of rushing yards, topping the second place runner Le’Veon Bell by nearly five hundred yards. But look closer at these two backs and it doesn’t look quite as dominant. Both had identical yard per carry averages of 4.7, and Bell offered much more in the passing game as a receiver and a blocker. Factor in receiving yards and Murray’s lead shrinks to less than fifty. Murray also benefited from the best offensive line in the league, and I think most people would argue that the line deserves the majority of the credit for Dallas’s success.

That raises another awkward question. Is there an offensive lineman we could give this award to? It will never happen of course. Lineman don’t have the exposure or the statistics to win this award. It is also very difficult to separate one lineman’s performance from the unit as a whole. By rule voters are allowed to cast their vote for a unit, and I would be tempted to give it to the Cowboys offensive line. But I think, for the sake of being realistic, we should drop linemen from consideration in this discussion.

Wide receiver is a more interesting situation. This season it was pretty clear that Antonio Brown was the best receiver in the league. He led the league in yards, blew the competition out of the water in receptions, and ended up tied for second in receiving touchdowns. His season is great in a historical sense as well. His 1698 yards are the sixth most all time, and his 129 receptions are the second most for a single season. Only three other receivers have ever matched his 1600/120/10 stat line. Factor in being top ten in the league in punt return average and a punt return touchdown, and you have indisputably the best season put together by a receiver this year in the NFL.

This may come as a surprise to some, but a wide receiver has never won NFL MVP. The award has been won 37.5 times by a quarterback, 17.5 times by a running back (Brett Favre and Barry Sanders shared one year), once by a defensive tackle, once by a linebacker, and once by a kicker (Mark Mosely in 1982, a strike shortened year in which he missed three extra points. The 80s was a stupid time.)

Wide receiver is viewed as a position of minimal value in the league. Counting receptions, runs, and punt returns Brown touched the ball a total of 163 times. 27 running backs had more carries than that. Wide receiver has become a more valued position in recent years, but it still carries the stigma of a player who only touches the ball seven or eight times a game. (It also doesn’t help that Brown is teammate with two other MVP candidates in Roethlisberger and Bell, or that Bell actually won the team MVP award.)

No other offensive player has asserted themselves as an MVP candidate, and in other years Rodgers’s slight superiority at quarterback would have been enough for him to win the award, as happened with Tom Brady in 2010 and Peyton Manning in 2008. But this is not any other year. There is a player in the league who has dominated his position in a way that no other has.

By now you know where I’m going with this, so I’ll just spit it out. The MVP of the league should be JJ Watt. I’m a bit of a late arrival on the JJ Watt MVP train, joining over the past few weeks as he’s continued to tear offenses apart and Aaron Rodgers has slipped back to the realm of mortal quarterbacks. I do think it should be more difficult for a defensive player to win the award, and I am not at all affected by Watt doing stuff around the goalline that any backup tight end in the league could do. Watt deserves this award because of what he’s done on defense, putting together one of the best seasons in NFL history by a defensive lineman.

Watt had 20.5 sacks this year, second in the NFL to Justin Houston’s 22. But his dominance goes far beyond sack numbers. He recorded a hit on an opposing quarterback 50 times this season. This was first in the league by a mile, almost doubling the second place total of 28. He recorded 29 tackles for a loss in addition to his sacks, six more than Houston’s second place total. He scored two defensive touchdowns and recorded a safety. In all likelihood he will be a unanimous selection as Defensive Player of the Year.

Most voters breathed a sigh of relief when the Ravens won on Sunday, eliminating Houston from the playoffs. This gave them an easy out to dismiss Watt’s candidacy. After all, anyone whose team misses the playoffs can’t be that valuable. This ignores the realities of Watt’s team. Five different quarterbacks took snaps for the Texans this season. Their three best skill position players on offense battled injuries throughout the year, and the rookie first overall pick who was supposed to give Watt support from the other side did absolutely nothing.

Houston made it as far as they did almost entirely because of Watt. They entered the final two weeks of the season needing to win both games to have any shot of making the playoffs. They won both games thanks to four sacks, a safety, and a forced fumble from Watt. Had Cleveland been able to hang on and beat the Ravens, the Texans would be in the playoffs now and the strongest argument against Watt would go out the window.

Aaron Rodgers has had a fantastic season and has been the best quarterback in the league, but if you compare him to recent top quarterbacks his season is merely average. This is the same thing we went through two years ago, when Peyton Manning put together a season similar to Rodgers’s this year while Adrian Peterson and JJ Watt put together all time great campaigns. If an elite performance at another position cannot beat an average performance at quarterback, what would it take for a nonquarterback to win the award? If this is the case, should we not simply rename the award MVQ?

Rodgers will win the award in the end, and I don’t think the voting will be particularly close. But I think we’re rapidly reaching the point where we have to consider splitting this into separate awards. As long as we’re caught up with the definition of value, it will be hard to argue that a nonquarterback deserves to win the award, no matter how much more dominant he was at his position than the top quarterback. The simplest solution would be to change the criteria, to make only quarterbacks eligible for MVP and only nonquarterbacks eligible for Offensive Player of the Year. Because if we hold ourselves to the criteria we are using to give the award to Rodgers this year, then I think there’s a decent chance that Adrian Peterson will be the last nonquarterback to be able to call himself the NFL MVP.