Faltering Front-Runners

We are in the midst of one of the wildest NFL seasons in recent memory, and the only thing more wide open than the top of the league standings is the race for MVP. In past years we’ve gotten used to seeing a quarterback distance himself from the pack by this point of the season, or at the very least have the field narrowed to two or three names.

That really isn’t the case this year, and not because there is a deep field of elite performers. Over the past eight years, only twice has a quarterback won MVP without reaching at least 8.0 in ANY/A (Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt). One of these was Cam Newton in 2015, who benefited from impressive rushing statistics that aren’t factored into this metric. The other was Tom Brady in 2017, the only year in that time that comes close to this one in terms of insanity.

And yet, twelve weeks into the season, there isn’t a single quarterback with an ANY/A over 8.0. The top performer right now is Matthew Stafford at 7.97, and he’s been fading hard as the Rams have lost three straight. Just as every NFL team has a couple of ugly performances on the season, every quarterback in the MVP conversation has laid a couple of eggs this year.

The lack of an elite quarterback performance has unsurprisingly led a lot of people to start pushing candidates at other positions. Derrick Henry was popular as his insane workload put him well ahead of every other running back, until the consequences of that workload caught up with him. Then it became Jonathan Taylor, even though he isn’t doing anything particularly special this year either. The best receiving stats belong to Cooper Kupp, but he’s been overshadowed by his quarterback as receivers almost always are. On defense Myles Garrett is probably the best candidate, but it’s going to be hard for him to get any attention unless the Browns start winning more games.

The reality is that it’s pretty much impossible for any non-quarterback to win the award. The winner this year will be a quarterback, and rightly so. There are still six more weeks in the season, and in all likelihood someone will get hot and pull away down the stretch.

Of course, we’ve been expecting that to happen all season. Every few weeks it seems like there’s a new favorite that emerges, only to fall flat on his face before he can create any real separation.

I decided to try to put some numbers to this pattern of inconsistent quarterback play. The first step in doing this was to try to identify who was the favorite each week so far during the season. There are two possible ways to do this. First, who has put up the best stats so far? Second, who does Vegas think has the best odds of winning?

I took a composite approach. To start the season, when there were no stats, I just used Vegas odds. After that, I just decided to average the two. Each week I ranked the top quarterbacks in two lists, one based on their MVP odds and one based on their ANY/A to that point. I then averaged those two rankings to see who fit the criteria from both angles.

Below I’ve listed the front-runner at each week in the season, and then showed how they performed in the following game, once they were considered the favorite.

 

A few things jump out when looking over this list. First of all, it is pretty ugly from a strictly win-loss perspective. MVP front-runners are 4-6 on the season with a game missed. For an award where team performance typically weighs heavily, even solid performances in losses like Mahomes in week 2 or Stafford in week 4 can take on an ugly cast.

But it doesn’t get much better when you drill down into the numbers. Only twice in nine attempts has the MVP front-runner matched their performance to that point in the season—again Mahomes in week 2, plus Murray in Week 5. There have only been three individual games above the 8.0 threshold I mentioned earlier.

Add up the performances across these weeks, and you get a quarterback who has thrown for 262 yards a game with 19 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. These aren’t terrible statistics, but they are hardly what we would expect from MVP candidates. The ANY/A of these performances would be 6.43, good for 17^th in the league this year.

Somehow, being named an MVP front-runner drops these quarterbacks into a group with Teddy Bridgewater, Mac Jones, and Baker Mayfield. And unless something changes soon, the race for this award is only going to become more of a headache.