To find out, we're doing a week-by-week ranking of the candidates most likely to win the honor. This week alone, we saw four players enter the conversation who weren't considered this time a week ago. Several other players either moved up or down in our weekly ranking of MVP candidates.
But the quarterback of the Buffalo Bills still has the lead, and that's where we start. If the MVP vote happened today, Allen wins. That was the case last week, and it's still the case now, even if the gap between him and the field has closed a bit.
The 2024 league MVP, Allen, already made history by becoming the first player with five or more touchdown passes and three or more touchdown runs through the first two games. On Sunday, Allen threw his first two interceptions of the season, but he also ran for a pair of scores and joined Jim Brown (1958), Stephen Davis (1999) and Priest Holmes (2003) as the only players to rush for two touchdowns in their first three games of a season. The league's reigning Offensive Player of the Year, Smith-Njigba is once again making a case to become the first receiver to win league MVP.
He closed the gap on Allen after catching a season-high 10 passes for 128 yards and two touchdowns in Seattle's 33-31 loss to Washington. The 24-year-old Smith-Njigba is on pace to make history. He leads the NFL in receptions (27, tied with New Orleans' Chris Olave), receiving yards (406) and touchdown catches (six).
He is on pace to shatter both Randy Moss' single-season record for touchdown receptions (23 in 2007) and Calvin Johnson's single-season receiving yardage record (1,964 yards in 2012). He's also on pace to break Michael Thomas' single-season receptions mark (149 in 2019). It's impossible to ignore the Raiders' history of older quarterbacks who have enjoyed career rebirths after joining the silver and black.
Joe Plunkett overcame obscurity to lead the Raiders to an unexpected title in 1980, Rich Gannon won MVP and led the Raiders to a Super Bowl in 2022, and Cousins is currently writing his own story for the 3-0 Raiders. The more the Raiders win, the more Cousins' MVP case becomes a real possibility. Purdy continued to help his MVP case in Week 3 by helping the battered 49ers improve to 3-0.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
