With a month remaining in the season, a legitimate case can be made for three players as winner of the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award.
New England’s uber-star Tom Brady and Philadelphia’s rising star Carson Wentz are likely to dominate most of the popular voting.
My vote is the least sexy of the three choices — Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson.
There’s little question the 10-2 Patriots or 10-2 Eagles would not be where they are without Brady or Wentz. Both have had awesome, difference-making seasons.
But both teams are dominating down divisions where there isn’t even competition. Wilson’s Seahawks are in the midst of a dogfight in the NFC West.
And, though statistics should not be the end-all in these arguments, there’s one stat involving Wilson that cannot be overlooked: The Seahawks have scored 30 offense touchdowns this season, and Wilson has accounted for 29 of them — 26 by passing and three by running.
Wilson’s 26 TD passes are second in the league to only Wentz’s 29 and are tied with Brady.
Wilson is on pace for a career-high in passing yards, and he’s the team’s leading rusher with 432 yards. He’s accounted for an astounding 82.2 percent of Seattle’s yards from scrimmage, which if it holds up would be the highest percentage of any one player in the Super Bowl era, according to the NFL.
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Wilson is the best fourth-quarter passer in the league with a 134.1 passer rating and 15 TD passes, and he’s done all of this behind an offensive line that has struggled this season.
Without Wilson, the Seahawks are not just out of the playoff picture, they might struggle to be merely ordinary. Wilson, with his innate scrambling ability, has been a one-man video game.
“I don’t know how you could carry it much more,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll told reporters last week. “When you have a quarterback that can do that, it changes everything. It might look like it’s going to be a scramble or he’s going to throw it, and then he takes off and runs for 15 or 18 yards or something like that.
“It’s just as hard as it can get, because you can structure your defense to play normal stuff, and then the play breaks down and then you’re not quite sure if it’s going to be like a QB draw or if it winds up being a spread-out or winds up being like a naked or boot — and then the defenders have to start all over again.”
Wilson, as per his personality, downplayed his greatness.
“Typically, the best quarterbacks in the National Football League find a way to make the 10 other guys better,” he told reporters last week. “That’s my main concern. That’s my focus at all times, is helping our team win.”
No one player has meant more to his team than Wilson, and I don’t see that changing in the next month. If the award is not a popularity contest and it is given out to the letter of the award’s title, then Wilson is the no-brainer choice.