This 2016 NFL season was surely one to remember, but what will truly stand out is its undeniably close MVP race. Whoever you think should win the NFL’s most coveted award this year, one thing is for certain, there is a case for many players. None of whom are more deserving then, you guessed it, Tom Brady.
This may come as a surprise to someone looking at the passing stats of this years top gunslingers in the NFL, but Tom Brady did in fact miss a quarter of the season.
Thats 4, count em’, 4 full NFL games less then his competition. Yet Brady still put up just shy of 300 completions, just 4 yards shy of 300 yards per game, followed with a total of over 3,500 yards and a staggering 28 TD’s (Lest we forget Legarrette Blount vultured 18 additional touchdowns).
These number land Brady among the top 15- 20 in every category, along with a top 7 finish in td’s. Also landing a spot just below his favored colleague Matt Ryan in the NFL’s quarterback rate with a score of 112.2, (with Ryan at 117).
To show how this rating lines up with the rest of the league, no other QB scored higher than 104. Oh and by the way, Tom Brady also broke the record for lowest interception percentage of any player in the history of the NFL at 0.46% with just 2 picks in 432 pass attempts, not too shabby huh?
However one of the biggest cases made for quarterbacks winning MVP is not the stats they put up, but the wins. Brady missing half the seasoning playing 12 games, won 11 of them, with the lone loss coming at the hands of arch rival Seattle. The only quarterback to post more wins then Brady in this discussion would be the young bull Dak Prescott out of Dallas. With Matt Ryan at 11 and Aaron Rodgers at 10, its horrendous for these candidates not to be able to reach a win total posted by a player who missed 4 games.
But do wins really matter when voting for an MVP?
When talking about wins, running backs aren’t held to the same standard these gunslingers are, and can scrape an MVP season out with their team going above .500. The game changes entirely when you switch the MVP conversation to quarterbacks. Since this award has been created, 40 quarterbacks have won the elusive MVP trophy, 30 of them have not had more than 3 losses on the season, and no QB in the history of the league has had over 5 losses and won an MVP.
With Ryan at 5 and Rodgers at 6, they fall into an extremely low percentile of quaterbacks in the MVP conversation. One would think in order for either of these QB’s to win the MVP, their passing statistics would have to blow the rest of the candidates out of the water, but this simply just isn’t the case.
Whatever your opinion, there is certainly many players extremely deserving of the NFL’s most prestigious award this year, whether it be Brady, or Ryan or Rodgers or Prescott or even Elliot. The true trophy these players are after, will rise them to greater heights then this MVP race ever could, and they play for it on the 5th of February.