NFL MVP 2017-18: Russell Wilson should win, but won’t

It was a three-man race for the 2017-18 NFL MVP until it wasn’t. The award is a quarterback’s to lose, from a playoff team and nothing less. Russell Wilson should win, but he won’t.

What do you want out of your 2017-18 NFL MVP? The award, at least in our lifetime, has been reserved for the best quarterback on a championship contender. That pretty drastically narrows the field of competitors and almost guarantees 2017’s winner will be Tom Brady. But what if it didn’t have to be that way?

What if the MVP was actually up for debate? What if the most valuable and dominating player actually won? Russell Wilson was that player this past season, but he won’t win regardless.

Two brothers from New York, Dan Salem and Todd Salem, debate the 2017-18 NFL MVP in today’s NFL Sports Debate.

Todd Salem:

Instead of rewarding the best playoff quarterback, the NFL MVP could go to the best offensive player in the playoffs, which might mean Todd Gurley is the winner. It could go to the best overall player on a contender, which could be Gurley’s teammate Aaron Donald.

The MVP may be best served in the hands of the most valuable player, which could be Brady, or it could still be Carson Wentz after seeing what the Philadelphia offense looks like without him. Missing games at the end of the year helped to solidify Wentz’s value to his team and the league.

MVP could also go to the best pure player, like it usually does in baseball, regardless of whether that player has playoff-caliber teammates around him. This is trickier in football, obviously, but someone like Russell Wilson would at least be in the running in this scenario.

He led the sport in touchdown passes and managed to lead his own squad in both rushing yards and rushing touchdowns out of the quarterback position. If my math is correct, Wilson accounted for 81.4 percent of Seattle’s total yards from scrimmage and a whopping 97.4 percent of the team’s offensive touchdowns this season. The former mark would be the second-highest in NFL history; no idea where the latter ranks, but surely it’s high!

I like the idea of Wentz winning the award personally. It doesn’t make sense to reward someone for missing games, but his absences actually aided his case, and it’s not like his numbers fell that far behind his peers. Of course, this is all a hypothetical exercise. Brady is going to win. Gurley is going to finish a distant second, and no one will bat an eye at either slotting.That’s how the MVP award works.

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Dan Salem:

I want my NFL MVP to be a combination of most valuable and best in the sport at his position. The MVP must be dominating and stand above his peers at his position. Comparing a defensive player to a quarterback is unfair, yet if a defensive player records 25 sacks and 10 interceptions, with the next closest being a mere 10 sacks and five interceptions, then that player absolutely dominated and stood above literally everyone.

Most valuable also falls on the quarterback most often, yet I believe Todd Gurley has a serious case this season. Antonio Brown has had one in seasons past. Both players are far and away the best at their position, and neither one’s team would be anything like itself without them. The 2017-18 NFL MVP is therefore a confusing mess.

Tom Brady had a very good season for a very good team. Yet the Patriots did nothing to wow anyone and played in an average division in an average AFC. Brady led his team, but boy did they show holes. The running game was a huge factor in New England’s success. I can not anoint Brady as NFL MVP this season. He was not as valuable to his team’s success as Gurley or Russell Wilson.

Wilson is my NFL MVP for the two statistics you noted. He scored over 97 percent of Seattle’s offensive touchdowns this season, via either the pass or the run. The reason the Seahawks failed to miss the playoffs is because he was the only valuable and reliable member of their offense. Seattle had no running game. Their defense was unspectacular overall. Yet the Seahawks had a winning record of 9-7 and only lost by more than 10 points in a single game. Isn’t Seattle a bottom of the league team without Wilson? I’m not sure we can say the same about New England or the Rams and their respective MVP candidates.

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Todd Salem:

I love your progressive take naming Wilson the league MVP, but I feel it necessary to point out that no defensive player will ever earn the honor in your world. No one has ever recorded 25 sacks. Only 75 players in the history of the sport picked off 10 passes in a season. Surely that was the point, but you also want the same person to reach both feats? Let’s just call it the Offensive MVP and be done with it. Maybe the more logical outcome is to remove the Offensive Player of the Year award since it’s essentially just the MVP runner-up and nothing more.