Stafford’s MVP is cemented in history, but it almost wasn’t

Matthew Stafford’s MVP season is now cemented in history. The Los Angeles Rams quarterback somehow put together his most impressive season yet in year 17 and took home the hardware.

The margin of Stafford’s victory over New England Patriots QB Drake Maye is worth discussing, but in time it is effectively meaningless. We won’t remember in two years that Maye came within a single first-place vote for the award. Stafford’s name is the one now etched into bronze, history, and into our brains.

This was the closest MVP race since 2003 and the third-smallest margin of victory behind 2003 and 1997. It’s the only MVP race that was this tight and did not result in a tie.

• 1997: Brett Favre and Barry Sanders (tied with 18 votes)
• 2003: Peyton Manning & Steve McNair (tied with 16 votes)
• 2025: Stafford won with 24 votes; Drake Maye second with 23 votes

Josh Allen and Justin Herbert received two and one first-place votes, respectively, this year. While those two players did not even come close to finishing on top, any one of these three votes easily could have swayed the outcome. Both players were longshots to take home the trophy according to most sportsbooks.

The voter who inked in Herbert’s name, Check the Mic co-host Sam Monson, did not pull his punches on Stafford when building his case for the last-place player:

I was the Justin Herbert vote. The guy had the worst offensive line in the NFL all season and despite that he was working miracles in almost every single game. Stafford’s OL became 2/5ths as bad as Herbert’s for 5 minutes and he became a turnover howitzer. He (Herbert) embodied ‘value’.

MVP is the single hardest award to ‘correctly’ determine, because the focus is on ‘value’, which is basically impossible to objectively evaluate with so many dependencies. But the idea that one vote altered a guy’s legacy is stupid. More people than not thought each candidate did NOT deserve to win MVP this year, according to the votes. There was not one clear MVP who was robbed of the award. Most people were torn between 2 deserving candidates. I thought a third deserved it as well, because the value he brought to his situation was immense.

Call it contrarianism gone wrong. Say it’s someone from an alternative sports platform that is too driven to prove the consensus wrong. These are all fair criticisms of Monson, and I’m saying this as a decade-long listener of his podcasts between Check the Mic and from his time at Pro Football Focus (PFF).

But his “throwaway vote” reasonably could have sealed the award for Stafford. Maye would have tied Stafford if Monson were to shift his vote from Herbert to the Patriots quarterback

Did Stafford win MVP by default? Possibly. This is a year where Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow, Brock Purdy, Daniel Jones, and Jayden Daniels all faced abbreviated seasons because of injury. That’s not to take anything away from Stafford, but both the rash of injuries and the tight margin of error demonstrate that this was an usual outcome in a historical fashion.

But, simply put, it does not matter. Stafford is the MVP and always will be. This award only reinforces Stafford’s future hall of fame case.

No one will call Drake Maye “MVP” or even remember him as an “almost”.