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It's a Team Sport, Part Infinity Plus One

The elimination of the Ravens from the NFL playoffs last night continues the league's most singular streak for another year. Baltimore QB Lamar Jackson is going to be MVP. He will also be the 20th MVP in succession whose team did not win the Super Bowl that season. It hasn't happened in this century. Kurt Warner and the Rams were the last to pull this double in the 1999 season.

What takes this streak from "that's weird" to "that's eerie" is that this century has seen players with both multiple MVPs and multiple Super Bowl championships, just not in the same seasons. Peyton Manning and Tom Brady have both eight MVP awards (Manning five, Brady three) and NFL titles (Brady six, Manning two) between them. For good measure Aaron Rodgers has two MVPs and one Super Bowl title. But the two honors have never overlapped.

Brady has what to him must be a galling distinction. The three seasons where he was the losing quarterback in the Super Bowl were the very three where he won the MVP, in 2007, 2011 and 2017. For that matter, Manning was 2-2 in Super Bowls, and he was MVP the two seasons his team lost, 2009 and 2013. They are part of a trend. MVP winners have gone 0 for 8 in the Super Bowl from the 2000 season on, which means that in 12 other seasons, such as this one, they didn't even get to the title game.

At first I thought this might be because the MVP has devolved into the Quarterback of the Year award, and the QB with the gaudiest stats of the regular season is less than a cinch in the playoffs, where opponents usually have a pretty good one, too. A little research informed me I was mistaken. Since Super Bowl I to now, 54 NFL seasons, the league MVP has also been on the Super Bowl champions nine times. The current century's bad luck for the award winners is not so much a drought as a winning streak for the norm.

Today's divisional games will feature four exceptional quarterbacks, DeShaun Watson, Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson. Two of them have been MVPs and certainly the other could win it before their playing days are done. They are by far the most important (another word for valuable) players on their teams. But by definition, two of them will not be on a Super Bowl winner this year. "Most important" does not mean "all important." Pro football tells us that every year. Why won't we listen?

posted by Michael Gee @ 10:53 AM