The NFL’s MVP award is a proxy for the league’s best quarterback. At least that’s how things have evolved over the past twenty years.
The reason for choosing a winner usually fits into one of three clichés: validating the legitimacy of a young star; confirming that an old man still has it; or handing it over to a consistent performer having a career year (hurray for Matt Ryan!).
It is logical. Not a single player worth more then the quarterback. They exert an unusual amount of control over the sport. Football is a game of acquiring physical real estate, and of the 22 moving pieces, only the quarterback has the ball in his hand on every play. No player in any other position could be have more value than that.
Related: Tommy DeVito makes $44,000 per game and lives with his mother. It is logical
The last time a non-quarterback won the MVP was in 2012, when running back Adrian Peterson rushed for more than 2,000 yards. The last defensive player to win the MVP was Lawrence Taylor in 1986. It was a different time. Four years earlier, a kicker – a KICKER! – won the prize.
But this season should mark a reset. Offensive production is down across the league. None of the preseason MVP favorites have lived up to expectations. And those who have, outside of Brock Purdy, fall below the compelling narrative threshold.
If there was ever a season where a non-quarterback should win the award, it’s this one.
Rattle through the typical candidates and they all fall short. Patrick Mahomes has been let down by his receiving corps. Jalen Hurts, Trevor Lawrence, Lamar Jackson and Justin Herbert haven’t quite lived up to preseason expectations or have been hamstrung by inconsistencies around them. Josh Allen has fallen out of contention after turnover issues. CJ Stroud is a rookie. Joe Burrow is injured. While Dak Prescott is playing the best football of his career, he will be surpassed by the Cowboys’ record against the league’s best. Jared Goff, Tua Tagovailoa and Purdy won’t be able to shake the idea that they are just products of very good systems.
Among quarterbacks, Hurts and Jackson have the best cases. But by their lofty standards, neither has been transcendent. Buy a data nerd a beer, and he or she will point out Hurts’ ranking behind Purdy, Allen and Prescott in the EPA+CPOE composite. Jackson sits behind Goff, Russell Wilson and Kirk Cousins. Even Mahomes is currently outside the top five.
The MVP should reward the player with the most impact – and serves as shorthand for the story of the season. In a year where offensive output has declined, a defensive player should be rewarded. You can make a case for Micah Parsons, Nick Bosa or Maxx Crosby. But this year’s MVP belongs to Myles Garrett.
His Cleveland Browns have the most overwhelming defense in the league. Look at that, they have the most overwhelming unit in the league. For 11 weeks, Cleveland’s defense has topped the charts in all major measures: EPA per play, passing percentage, passer rating assigned, sack percentage, third-down conversion percentage.
EPA per game is a measure of down-to-down 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, twice as good as the best defense from a year ago. For context, the gap from the first-place Browns to the second-place Ravens this season is the same as the distance between the second-place Ravens and the ninth-place Steelers.
Those are team stats, but everything Cleveland does on defense comes from Garrett.
Since the Browns drafted him No. 1 overall in 2017, Garrett has been one of the top three pass rushers. He leads the NFL in sacks combined for the past five years. But Garrett has reached a new level this season. He leads the league in sacks and pass-rush winning percentage. He is the only player in the Top 10 in pass-rush win rate and run-stop rate. He is at the top of the table in terms of pressure per rush. And he leads the NFL in highlights of the Wait-I-Just-Switched-To-A-Marvel Movie.
Garrett is a one-man avalanche. He wins in every way you can imagine – and in some ways you can’t. He dusts guys off the snap and uses his first step to blow past blockers. If he doesn’t win his stance, he rams his outstretched arms into a pass protector’s chest and gleefully throws them away.
Try to beat Garrett to the edge so he can dive back in. He is positioned narrowly to try to close off the corridor for the quarterback so he can dip and rip around the outside. Sink to the right spot, and there comes the locomotive; people bounce off Garrett like there’s a force field around him.
The 27-year-old has all the tools at his disposal – and he’s thinking two steps ahead of those who try to stop him. Even then Garrett tells blocking what he’s going to do before the snap, they can’t keep up. Look at this:
That’s nonsense.
Garrett can win with cleverness, bulldozing power or evasive footwork. When a player can do anything – and he knows he can do anything – he no longer has to worry about silly things like protection schemes or an All-Pro tackle on the other side. To top it all off, Garrett plays with maniacal effort.
There are no right answers for opposing offenses, and that’s because the simplest answer – double teaming – is also a bad answer. It leaves one-on-ones across the board for every other defender and Garrett is breaking double teams at a league-leading pace; he has been double-teamed on 32% of his snaps this season and still leads the league in pass-rush wins.
No defender draws so much attention while being so unblockable. Short of unleashing a T-Rex on the field, there’s no way to slow Garrett down. If you keep his current pace, the single-season sack record will be the same within reach.
Garrett brings an organizing ethos to Cleveland’s defense: speed and chaos. New defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz is one of the most brilliant minds in football, and even he has fallen short let them try to deal with Myles as its schematic drumbeat. Schwartz is a shrewd tactician, unafraid to buck football orthodoxy, but he has steered clear of some of the league’s better innovations because Garrett has allowed him to stick to his usual principles: rushing with four , stretch the line of defense as wide as possible and give his. best players have the freedom to do what they do best: run around and hit things.
Everyone thinks they lived in the golden age of the pass rush. It’s not our fault we’re right. In any other year, you could make a case for Parsons, Crosby or Bosa to earn the Defensive Player of the Year-MVP double. But this is not a normal year. Garrett is the best show there is; his tape against Pittsburgh last week when he destroyed the Steelers is for adult audiences only.
The Browns are tied for the second-best record in the AFC. ESPN gives the team a 7% chance of claiming the No. 1 seed and a bye in the first round. And this with fifth-round rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson at quarterback after Deshaun Watson’s season-ending injury.
The fact that Cleveland is still in the postseason hunt at all is solely due to fielding the league’s best defense. And that defense is only at the top of the pile because of Garrett. That makes him a pretty valuable player no matter how you look at it.