The NFL Honors were held Thursday night. In the final award presentation of the night, it was announced that Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford won the MVP over New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye in one of the closest races in history.
It has since come out that Maye lost by just five points after earning 23 of the 50 first-place votes. Stafford, in comparison, received 24 of the votes, giving him a slight 366 to 361 edge in the total voting.
Three voters threw away their votes. Two voted for Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, while one inexplicably sided with Justin Herbert of the Los Angeles Chargers.
That voter has now identified himself as Sam Monson, an Irish podcast host.
“I was the Justin Herbert vote,” Monson wrote. “The guy had the worst offensive line in the NFL all season and despite that he was working miracles in almost every single game. Stafford’s OL became 2/5ths as bad as Herbert’s for 5 minutes and he became a turnover howitzer. He embodied ‘value’.”
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Herbert had the fourth most interceptions in the league and 1,000 fewer yards than Stafford.
Turning the NFL’s most coveted award into a “who had less help competition” without including the fact that Maye’s surrounding talent is far less impressive than Herbert’s Hall of Fame wide receiver one, two top-35 draft pick receivers, and first-round running back is voting malpractice.
“MVP is the single hardest award to ‘correctly’ determine, because the focus is on ‘value’, which is basically impossible to objectively evaluate with so many dependencies,” Monson said. “But the idea that one vote altered a guy’s legacy is stupid. More people than not thought each candidate did NOT deserve to win MVP this year, according to the votes. There was not one clear MVP who was robbed of the award. Most people were torn between 2 deserving candidates. I thought a third deserved it as well, because the value he brought to his situation was immense.”
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Without getting too bogged down in the numbers — which ALL unequivocally favor Maye — voting for a turnover machine on the No. 7 seed in the AFC because his offensive line got hurt frequently is bizarre.
Deciding the sixth-year quarterback provided more “value” to a team that has made the playoffs in three of the last four seasons than the 23-year-old who nearly single-handedly brought a back-to-back 4-13 football team to the Super Bowl is beyond bizarre — it is asinine.
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