The Rams running back has had a historically great December, and the MVP race appears to be down to two. Here’s how Todd Gurley could win — and how Tom Brady could hold him off.
First, it was Tom Brady vs. Carson Wentz. Then, it was Tom Brady vs. Antonio Brown. Now, after both those superstars went down with injuries, the most obvious competitor standing between Brady and his third MVP award is a record-setting running back. Todd Gurley has been absolutely unconscious over the past three weeks. The Rams running back has eight touchdowns over that span, which is more than the entire Browns roster has over its last six games combined.
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It has been a stunning season for a player who spent most of 2016 stuck in the mud for a going-nowhere Rams team. The Rams will host the franchise’s first home playoff game in California since 1985 during wild-card weekend, and while the turnaround of Jared Goff under the tutelage of Sean McVay has been shocking, it’s difficult to imagine the Rams making the playoffs without their workhorse at running back.
Gurley has been great, but should voters really pick him over Brady? Or should the Patriots’ signal-caller deserve recognition for the latest in a series of dominant seasons? Let’s make the case for why Gurley is likely to receive serious consideration, then pick an MVP favorite with two games and one week left in the season. The five-point plan for Gurley to win goes as follows:
The Associated Press voters are only human. They make their choices in late-December, so they’re naturally going to be thinking about what each candidate was doing over the final month of the season. Think about Adrian Peterson, who struggled early in the 2012 season and then ran off nine 100-yard games in 10 weeks to end his season, including a December with two 200-yard games and a 199-yard effort in a playoff berth-clinching victory over the Packers in Week 17. His final run of the year was a 26-yarder that set up the game-winning field goal and saw him carried off the field by a teammate as the entire crowd chanted « MVP. » You couldn’t have written a better case for Peterson.
Gurley, meanwhile, got off to a hot start before slowing down as the Rams went with a heavier dosage of their passing attack in November. He failed to average even 60 rushing yards per game in November and scored three touchdowns across four contests. That was in a month in which the Rams dropped 51 points on the Giants and 33 on the Texans before losing to the Vikings and narrowly topping the Saints.
In December, though, Gurley has been a monster. He has specifically peaked over the last three weeks of the season, which coincide with the fantasy football playoffs. Voters obviously aren’t going to treat Gurley differently because he won some of them their fantasy leagues, but to put his production in context, the 23-year-old just enjoyed the best fantasy playoffs (Weeks 14-16) in NFL history:
In comparison, while Brady has put together a great season, he’s not peaking in December. The future Hall of Famer has thrown six interceptions over his last five games, including a pick-six in Sunday’s 37-16 victory over the Bills. Brady had thrown just four picks in his previous 22 starts dating back to his return from suspension in 2016. Bothered by an Achilles injury, Brady has thrown more interceptions (five) than touchdowns in December, with an 81.5 passer rating placing him below Mitchell Trubisky and just ahead of Tom Savage for 19th among qualifying passers this month.
While Gurley was struggling during midseason, Brady was running off one of the hottest stretches of the season, posting a 114.7 passer rating while throwing nine touchdowns without a pick. We probably shouldn’t treat games in December as more meaningful in terms of MVP consideration than the ones in previous months, but that’s the way voters seem to think about the process, so it would be foolish to ignore Gurley’s blistering December season.
Recent history suggests that running backs need to post crooked numbers to overcome the positional bonus handed to quarterbacks and receive even modest MVP consideration. Peterson nearly set the rushing record by running for 2,097 yards in 2012. The previous MVP to come from behind the quarterback was LaDainian Tomlinson, who racked up a staggering 31 touchdowns from scrimmage in 2006, including 28 rushing scores. One year earlier, Shaun Alexander ran for 27 touchdowns. If you want the hardware as a running back, the bare minimum requirement is to have a rushing yardage total or a touchdown total that starts with the No. 2.
It’s tougher for a running back to generate the gaudy numbers of even a decade ago with modern workloads, but Gurley could finish the season with some truly impressive stats. If he scores twice in what is likely to be a shootout with the 49ers next Sunday, Gurley will be the first running back to top 20 touchdowns in a season since Alexander in 2005. He holds a seven-touchdown lead over every other player in the league, with no other running back, wide receiver or tight end topping 12 scores.
That lead in touchdowns might be critical. Le’Veon Bell could eat into the deficit during Pittsburgh’s game Monday, but Gurley is in good shape if he maintains that massive advantage. Since the 1970 merger, five other running backs have made it to the end of the season while leading the league with a touchdown total seven or more scores ahead of the competition. Three of them — Tomlinson, Alexander, and Marshall Faulk — have finished their seasons with an MVP trophy. As for Brady, meanwhile, this isn’t an otherworldly campaign. Many of his competitors have fallen by the wayside thanks to injuries, but his league lead in passing yards is by a mere 259 yards over Philip Rivers. He trails Wentz in passing touchdowns despite playing two additional games. Brady is third in completion percentage and yards per attempt and second in passer rating behind Alex Smith.
Brady’s season is also below the typical standard we see from MVP-winning quarterbacks. Pro Football Reference tracks quarterback statistics and adjusts them for the scoring level of each year in question as index stats. (More on them here .) Across the board, Brady’s era-adjusted statistics in 2017 would make him one of the least imposing MVP winners in recent memory. We won’t have updated index statistics until after the week is over, but here’s where he ranked among the 33 other winners of this award since 1970 in PFR’s index stats heading into Week 16, a week which will only bring his stats down more:
This isn’t even really a particularly notable season for Brady relative to his typical level of play. Rank Brady seasons and, even with a week to go, this one will finish no higher than fourth in passing yards. This season would rank fourth in yards per attempt, sixth in touchdown-to-interception ratio, fifth in passer rating and eighth among 11 recorded seasons in Total QBR. It’s a great campaign for mortal quarterbacks and a good one for Brady, but it’s a step below the stratospheric seasons that won him this award in 2007 and 2010.
This is going to be a problem with his candidacy, although it has nothing to do with Brady himself. Voters in all sports, including football, get easily exhausted of perennial candidates and often prefer players who either took a leap forward from their established level of play and/or haven’t won an award previously. Brady could quite viably have been a candidate for most of the past decade and has only won two awards. Likewise, Bill Belichick has won Coach of the Year three times in 17 seasons with the Patriots, even though just about every one of us would have picked him as the best football coach alive for 13 or 14 of those campaigns. As much as we know Belichick might deserves the award on a near-annual basis, he doesn’t even receive serious consideration most seasons by virtue of setting his own bar impossibly high.
There are exceptions, but if a vote is close, most of the voters tend to lean toward the new face over the guy who will be back next year. Gurley, who looks like a different human than the guy we saw in 2016, is that new face. He’s in the middle of what would be a career year for just about any running back. Gurley won Offensive Rookie of the Year for an explosive 13-game campaign in 2015, but he would have never received even the slightest bit of MVP consideration before now.
He doesn’t need to make monster plays to be effective, obviously, but the Brady engine works on supreme efficiency. He beats you by staying ahead of schedule, avoiding turnovers and finding receivers for easy completions drive after drive after drive. Brady’s style doesn’t lend itself to highlight reels. He has eight completions on throws traveling 30 yards or more in the air this season, only one of which has led to a touchdown (against three picks). Rob Gronkowski is the guy who gets lauded for spectacular plays on this team, not Brady.
Gurley, meanwhile, ranks alongside Gronk, Alvin Kamara and Antonio Brown as the season’s most spectacular players.
