The NFL’s MVP award is a stand-in for the league’s best quarterback. At least that’s how it’s evolved over the last 20 years.
The reason for picking a winner usually boils down to one of three clichés: validating a young star’s legitimacy; confirming that an elderly man still has the disease; or give it to a consistent player who is having a career year (Hooray for Matt Ryan!).
Logical. no player more valuable than the quarterback. They have an unusual control over the sport. Football is a game of physical possession, and among 22 moving parts, only the quarterback has the ball in his hands at every offensive snap. There are no players in any other position can It has more value than that.
Relating to: Tommy DeVito earns $44,000 per game and lives with his mother. Logical
The last time a non-quarterback won the MVP award was in 2012, when running back Adrian Peterson rushed for more than 2,000 yards. The last defensive player to win the MVP award was Lawrence Taylor in 1986. It was a different time. Four years ago, a kicker – A KICKER! – won the award.
But this season should signal a reset. Offensive production is down across the league. None of the preseason MVP favorites lived up to expectations. What happens beyond Brock Purdy falls below the threshold of compelling narrative.
If there was ever a season where a non-quarterback should win the award, this is it.
Scroll through typical candidates and they all fall short. Patrick Mahomes was disappointed by the team that adopted him. Jalen Hurts, Trevor Lawrence, Lamar Jackson and Justin Herbert haven’t quite lived up to preseason expectations or have been hampered by inconsistency around them. Josh Allen withdrew from contention following turnover struggles. CJ Stroud is a rookie. Joe Burrow is injured. Even though Dak Prescott is playing the best football of his career, he will fall short of the Cowboys’ record against the league’s best. Jared Goff, Tua Tagovailoa and Purdy won’t be able to shake the idea that they’re just products of very good systems.
Among quarterbacks, Hurts and Jackson are the players in the best shape. But by their high standards, neither was transcendent. Buy a data geek a beer and they’ll point out that Hurts ranks behind Purdy, Allen, and Prescott in the EPA+CPOE mix. He sits behind Jackson, Goff, Russell Wilson and Kirk Cousins. Even Mahomes is outside the top five right now.
The MVP should reward the game’s most impactful player and serve as a shorthand for the story of the season. In a year where offensive efficiency has decreased, the defensive player needs to be rewarded. You can defend Micah Parsons, Nick Bosa or Maxx Crosby. However, this year’s MVP belongs to Myles Garrett.
The Cleveland Browns have the most underwhelming defense in the league. Never mind, they have the single most underwhelming unit in the league. Through 11 weeks, Cleveland’s defense has topped the charts in every key metric: EPA per play, pass rate, passer rating lost, sack percentage, third-down conversion percentage.
EPA per play is a measure of bottom-up impact (stick with me). In a normal year, a defense hitting -0.1200 would put them at the top of the NFL. The Browns are currently at -0.2060; That’s twice as good as the best defense from a year ago. For context, the gap between the first-place Browns and the second-place Ravens this season is the same as the distance between the second-place Ravens and the ninth-place Steelers.
These are team stats, but everything Cleveland does defensively comes from Garrett.
Since the Browns drafted him No. 1 overall in 2017, Garrett has been a top-three pass rusher; He led the NFL in total the last five years combined. But Garrett has reached a new level this season. He leads the league in sacks and pass rush percentage. He is the only player ranked in the Top 10 in pass-rush win rate and run-interception rate. He tops the table in pressure per attack. And he leads the NFL in I-did-I-wait-for-a-Marvel-movie highlight clips.
Garrett is a one-man avalanche. You win in every way you can imagine, and some you don’t. He dusts guys off by using his first step to blast blockers. If he can’t get out of his stance, he slams his outstretched arms into the pass defenders’ chests and throws them gleefully.
Try to beat Garrett all the way down and he can dive in too. Create a tight position to try to close the lane to the point guard and he can dive in and rip from the outside. Dive into the right spot and here comes the locomotive; people are attacking Garrett as if there is a force field around him.
The 27-year-old player has all kinds of tools at his disposal and intends to be two steps ahead of those who try to stop him. Even if it’s Garrett tells Blockers can’t figure out what to do before the snap. Look at this:
This is bullshit.
Garrett can win with his intelligence, overwhelming strength, or evasive footwork. If a player can do it all and knows he can do it all, it frees him from worrying about stupid things like protection schemes or the All-Pro tackle lined up on the other end. Moreover, Garrett plays with insane effort.
There is no good answer for opposing offenses, and that’s because the simplest answer (double teaming) is also a bad answer. This leaves one-on-one tackles for all other linebackers, and Garrett is beating double-teams at a league-leading rate; He’s been double-teamed on 32% of his snaps this season and still ranks near the top in pass-rush win rate.
No defender can attract this much attention while being so unblockable. There’s no way to slow Garrett down beyond unleashing a T-Rex onto the field. Maintain current rate and single-season sack record close.
Garrett brings an organized mentality to Cleveland’s defense: speed and chaos. New defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz is one of the brightest minds in football, and even he failed in this regard. let them try to deal with Myles as his schematic drum beat. Schwartz is an experienced tactician who is not afraid to challenge football orthodoxy, but he has stayed away from some of the league’s interesting innovations because Garrett has allowed him to stick to his usual principles: Attack with a back four, stretch the defensive line as much as possible and give it his strength. The best players have the freedom to do what they do best: run around and crash into things.
Everyone thinks it’s the golden age of passing. It’s not our fault we’re right. In any other year, you could have Parsons, Crosby or Bosa doubling the Defensive Player of the Year-MVP award. But this is not a normal year. Garrett is the best actor on the show; The tape he recorded last week against Pittsburgh, where he destroyed the Steelers, is for mature audiences only.
The Browns have the second-best record in the AFC. ESPN gives the team a 7% chance of earning the No. 1 seed and a first-round bye. And that goes for fifth-round rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson, who served as the starting quarterback after Deshaun Watson’s season-ending injury.
The fact that Cleveland is still in the postseason hunt is simply because they field the league’s best defense. And this defense is at the top of the list because of Garrett. Whichever way you look at it, that makes him a pretty valuable player.