Anti-Pats fans will hate this
Brady all alone in MVP race
In continuing with the theme of yesterday’s column — which is that everybody hates the Patriots and when you get right down to it that makes for a lot of fun around here — allow me to tell you how the National Football League’s 2017 MVP race is going to turn out.
Tom Brady is going to win his third career MVP award. (In his two previous MVP seasons, the Pats did not go on to win the Super Bowl, but that’s a story for another day.)
And in a lot of NFL ports of call — that is, every port of call outside New England — a whole lot of sports asterisking will be going on.
You know what sports asterisking is, right? (Surprisingly, my auto-correct didn’t change “asterisking” to “antiquing.”) Sports asterisking is a clever contrivance that allows its user to toss a wet blanket on an athlete’s individual accomplishments, and it can be done verbally and in print.
Verbal use: When Roger Clemens registered a record 20 strikeouts against the woeful Seattle Mariners in 1986, there were some critics who scoffed and said, “That record should have an asterisk next to it.” (The ’86 Mariners lost 92 games and posted the fourth-highest strikeout total in the bigs that season.)
In terms of being used in print, the trusty sports asterisk was placed next to Roger Maris’ then-record 61 home runs in 1961 in a lame attempt to protect Babe Ruth’s 60-home run mark from 1927. (The ’27 Yankees played in the era of the 154game season, whereas the schedule had been inflated to 162 games by ’61.)
Why, you ask, would a sports asterisk be used to explain/deflate/dismiss/ mock/criticize Tom Brady being named the next NFL MVP? Easy: He’ll be viewed not as MVP (Most Valuable Player) but as MVS (Most Valuable Survivor). He will be viewed as LMS (Last Man Standing), and as the victor in a goofy game of football musical chairs in which the music stops and those players still able to walk take a seat.
The list of might-havebeen Most Valuable Players keeps growing and growing, to the point where the gurneys in the hallways at NFL General Hospital are now bumper-to-bumper like the Zakim at 5:15 p.m.
This past Sunday, during the epic showdown in which the Pats emerged with a 27-24 victory against the Pittsburgh Steelers, MVP candidate Antonio Brown was lost for the remainder of the regular season with a partially torn calf muscle. The talk is the wide receiver will be back in time for the playoffs, which is great for the Steelers’ Super Bowl chances but puts him out of the MVP sweepstakes.
The week before last, the dropped-off-at-the-wayside MVP candidate was the Philadelphia Eagles’ Carson Wentz. The second-year quarterback suffered a torn ACL in the third quarter of a 43-35 win against the Los Angeles Rams and is out through the playoffs and, perhaps, beyond.
These injuries could be construed as “good news” to anyone with an interest in Brady being named MVP. The injuries also are “good news” for the Hate Brady crowd because they create a platform for sports asterisking. As in: “The only reason Brady is MVP is because . . .”
Both of these sides are sadly, stupidly wrong, of course. To begin with, no normal sports fan should ever find a reason to celebrate an injury to an opposing player, even if the opposing player is a card-carrying Bad Guy. Besides, in the case of Brown, we’re being denied the opportunity to see if this was going to be the season in which a receiver is given even a cursory look in the MVP race. No receiver ever has been named MVP, and one hasn’t garnered a single MVP vote since Randy Moss in 1998. (Then with the Minnesota Vikings, Moss received four votes; the winner, running back Terrell Davis of the Denver Broncos, received 25.)
As for Wentz, turns out the injury is more significant than originally thought, which means the comeback might take longer, and, well, that would be awful. Nobody’s saying Wentz is going to be the next Robert Edwards, the Patriots running back whose career all but ended after he suffered a freak knee injury following his rookie season in 1998. But nobody wants to read the words “more significant than originally thought” in a story about an injury to a second-year quarterback.
The injuries to Brown and Wentz notwithstanding, Tom Brady should be MVP anyway. The 40-year-old quarterback has passed the Patriots to yet another AFC East banner, and though he has struggled somewhat lately, he did engineer a huge drive late in the fourth quarter to lead the Pats to their improbable comeback victory against the Steelers. That’s why he’ll be MVP. And if he’s MVP with a sports asterisk slapped to the side of his helmet, it’ll at least give us something to talk about during the Super Bowl pregame show.