HOUSTON – The league will hand out hardware Saturday night at its NFL Honors event and the most anticipated award is MVP.
The two quarterbacks left standing – Matt Ryan and Tom Brady – are the frontrunners for the award and Brady told me recently that Ryan “deserves” to win.
A panel of 50 selected by the Associated Press votes on MVP, a host of other awards and All-Pro selections. I’ve been one of the 50 voters since 2007. The ballot deadline was January 4.
Ryan is expected to win. He’s had a statistically brilliant regular season and the way Atlanta performed in the postseason only served to validate the work he’d done for 16 weeks.
As amazing as Brady’s season was both statistically and in hitting the ground running after the NFL’s four-game exile, that he played 12 games while Ryan played them all was undoubtedly a factor.
If Ryan does indeed win, another storyline will be added to Super Bowl Sunday. The league MVP hasn’t been on a Super Bowl champion since Kurt Warner in 1999.