Patrick sittin’ pretty for third MVP award
Just a few days after winning his second NFL MVP award in five years as a full-time starter, Patrick Mahomes is already priced as the co-favorite to win it again in 2023.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone to see the two-time MVP atop the opening odds for next year’s award: He’s dealing at +650 to win it at BetMGM and FanDuel, tied with Joe Burrow and Josh Allen for the shortest odds on the board. Mahomes certainly earned that respect after leading the NFL in passing yards (5,250), touchdowns (41) and QBR (77.6) in 2022, all while winning 14 games as a starter.
Perhaps the only surprise is why the reigning MVP’s odds aren’t even shorter.
As tight as the price may seem, it’s a relative bargain for a player who earned 48 of 50 first-place votes this past season to run away with his second MVP award. There was, in voters’ minds, no question who was the most valuable player in the league — during a season that, statistically speaking, wasn’t even Mahomes’ best effort.
So why wouldn’t he win it again next year? The clearest rebuttal for a player winning consecutive MVPs — which has happened just six times in NFL history — has long been the hard-to-define “narrative” argument, which generally posits that reigning MVP winners are held to a standard too rich for voters to reward them a second time around.
The narrative has changed, Stats rule the day, and they tend to be the overwhelming factor — if not the only one — to decide each season’s top individual honor.
Look no further than Aaron Rodgers, who took home the 2020 NFL MVP award behind one of the best seasons we’ve ever seen. The Packers quarterback finished with 4,299 passing yards and led the league in passing touchdowns (48), completion percentage (70.7), QBR (79.8) and passer rating (121.5) amid a 13-3 campaign.
The next year, Rodgers’ stats dropped almost entirely across the board, as he threw for fewer yards (4,115) and touchdowns (37) with a worse completion rate (68.9 percent) than the year before. But he won MVP, anyway, because his 37-to-four touchdown-to-interception ratio and 69.1 QBR were still the best in the league, narrative be damned.
When Nuggets star Nikola Jokic won his second straight NBA MVP in 2021-22, the narrative clearly worked against him as the leader of a 48-win team — just the third time in league history a player has claimed MVP honors for a team that won fewer than 50 games. Yet his statistical résumé was simply too gaudy: he averaged 27.1 points, 13.8 rebounds and 7.9 assists and led the league in just about every advanced metric you could imagine, and it wasn’t particularly close.
Sure enough, Jokic is the clear favorite to win it again this year thanks to his sheer statistical dominance, which seemed inconceivable to the “narrative” detractors before the season. In MLB, Shohei Ohtani is a unicorn of statistical greatness and just two years removed from unanimously winning the 2021 AL MVP. If it weren’t for Aaron Judge’s pursuit of the home run record in 2022, we would have seen a two-time reigning winner on the Angels — and Ohtani is already the clear favorite (+200) to win the award in 2023.
So why wouldn’t we expect the same result in the NFL next season? Here’s the dirty secret: Mahomes’ 41 touchdown passes last season were his second-most in five years as the Chiefs’ starter. His 308.8 yards per game were his third-best; his passer rating (105.2) and QBR (77.6) both ranked fourth. A bet against Mahomes is a bet against the twotime MVP simply sustaining his career averages — and a bet against Kansas City coach Andy Reid putting him in position to do so.
The reflex is still there to suggest that another season “on par” with Mahomes’ recent greatness won’t be enough. Don’t be foolish. Statistical greatness is the only narrative that matters when it comes time for voters to cast their ballots each season, and that won’t be changing anytime soon.