Finally, a Uniform MVP Analysis We Can All Get Behind
At long last, I have devised a clear and uniform standard for voting on the various sports league’s highest individual honor, usually called the “MVP” (Most Valuable Player) award, but also the Heisman Trophy in college football, and so on. Granted, there are greater societal concerns out there, but if we can work this one out, is one less thing to worry about.
The problem with these awards has been two-fold. Not only is there no set, clear standard for voters to follow but, further, these are individual awards given in team sports, where team success is paramount. Thus, matters are often inconsistent and confused. However, I am confident that this can all be reconciled with what I will call the Uniform MVP Analysis (the UMA), set forth below.
First, it will help to debunk two common arguments that often cloud this analysis.
1) The “How-good-without-them?” argument.
On a recent telecast, Fox-TV college football broadcaster Brock Huard, a Heisman voter, explained this approach: “[F]or me, take [the candidate] off the team they’re on and tell me what that team looks like.” That is, without their star players, some teams would still manage to do okay, but others would not. Often this just means that if a player has a lesser supporting cast, their team has to rely on them more, and thus they get an automatic bump in the voting. Granted, this is a way to measure value, but it is not the best.
Why this falls short:
Too often, this analysis looks beyond the player’s real value and instead becomes a referendum on the rest of their team. For a vote to hinge on matters outside of a player’s control, or even outside of their own performance, makes no sense. This is precisely the sort of arbitrariness that voters should be wanting to eliminate. This leads to the second failing argument.
2) The “But-they-didn’t-win-x” argument.
Some also argue that a player should not be considered for MVP if their team has not won sufficiently enough, i.e., they didn’t have a high enough winning percentage or they didn’t win a championship. At halftime of another recent college football game, Fox commentators debated whether LSU’s star quarterback, Jayden Daniels, should win the Heisman. All four analysts seemed to agree that Daniels was in fact the best player in the country, yet some believed that his team had lost too many games for him to win the award. Mind you, they were not saying Daniels played poorly in those games, just that his team had lost three times (out of nine games).
Why this falls short:
There is no point in penalizing a player for having a lesser supporting cast. The player is not the head coach, the general manager, the owner, or anyone else. For example, if a baseball player hits .400 with 100 home runs, but the rest of his team is historically terrible, there is no point in pretending that the player is not the best, i.e., most valuable, player in the league.
Granted, any intangibles a player may possess that help their team win, such as leadership, for example, should always be factored into voting. But this need not be an excuse to reward a lesser player simply for being fortunate to have superior teammates. There are already accolades and recognition strictly for team performance. As such, there is no reason for voters to get things twisted, especially if there is a new analysis for determining the real MVP. Which there is.
The Uniform MVP Analysis
An MVP-type analysis needs to avoid arbitrariness while otherwise taking into account a player’s full contributions to their team’s winning. With that in mind, I propose the following, two-step analysis.
Step One: Voters should imagine they have the first pick in a draft from all players in the league. Thus, every player is given a fair, clean slate, whether their supporting cast was the 0–16, 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the 1927 “Murderer’s Row” Yankees.
Step Two: Based on that year’s performance, voters should decide who they would select first to have the best chance of winning a championship.
That’s it. This analysis puts the focus squarely on performance and winning while still accounting for intangibles. This will resolve a lot of needless hassles and inequities going forward in at least one area of our lives.
Now can we talk about pass interference rules that reward quarterbacks for badly underthrown long passes?
