If one particular stat is to be believed, the 2016 NFL MVP award is a two-man race between Tom Brady and Matt Ryan.
Yet according to NFL insider Michael Lombardi on this week's "Make Me Smarter" football podcast, the real favorite for the award should be Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who has managed to transform a team that was on the brink of failure this season into a Super Bowl contender — and one that Colin Cowherd called the best team in football.
Listen to this week's episode to learn more about why Rodgers is the MVP, why the New York Giants aren't good enough to win a Super Bowl, and why the Houston Texans are one of the scariest teams in the league with Brock Osweiler on the sidelines.
LOMBARDI: The reality here is that what Aaron Rodgers is doing — his numbers are slightly below his two MVP seasons, his yards per attempt is slightly down, but when you look at this football team and you see what he's done offensively, and the creativity that he has when he makes plays like he did to Jordy Nelson [in Week 15] at the end of the game, which essentially won the game, I think he's carrying the team.
Is the defense good enough? It's better, because they're healthy, but they're still one of the worst tackling defenses in the league. They rank 30th in yards allowed after the catch. So they can't tackle very well. They have to win with their offense.
So to me, the most valuable player in the National Football League is Aaron Rodgers, because of what he's able to do and because he makes other players better. ...
Everything the Packers have done over the last five weeks has proved my point even stronger, in the fact that if you give Rodgers a good team, and you give him a diversified portfolio in terms of the players around him, he will make those players better, and he will ascend the team and carry them all the way through.
Indeed, Rodgers hasn't been nearly as efficient this year as he was in 2011 or 2014, the two years that he won the Super Bowl. This season, Rodgers is averaging 7.7 yards per attempt and completing 64.9 percent of his passes, compared to 9.2 yards per attempt and a 68.3 completion percentage in 2011 and 8.4 yards/attempt and a 65.6 completion percentage in 2014.
Yet Rodgers isn't the only quarterback having an MVP-caliber season, as Nick Wright argues that Dak Prescott should win the award despite the fact that the Dallas Cowboys have an immense amount of talent around their rookie QB. In Wright's opinion, it's unfair to punish Prescott for the Cowboys' ability to build a Super Bowl-caliber roster. Check out the rest of the "Make Me Smarter" podcast to hear Wright explain why a Honda Civic (Rodgers, in this metaphor) is never more valuable than a $1 million sportscar in a garage overflowing with vehicles, even if the Honda is your only way of getting to work.
I promise, it makes perfect sense if you give it a listen.
