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The Year the NFL Went Insane and Gave a Kicker the MVP Award «
When I wrote about sub-replacement MVP candidates in baseball two weeks ago, my brain naturally considered the possibilities for unlikely MVP candidates in football. There’s virtually no chance of a replacement-level player receiving that sort of attention in the NFL because the voting structure for the two awards is different; while baseball voters each pick a top 10, the 50 media members who vote for the Associated Press’s MVP1 award in football only name a single player.
Given that MVP candidates are almost always star quarterbacks or players at other positions producing freakish seasons, there’s virtually no chance of even an average player receiving an MVP vote, let alone a replacement-level player. And yet, in 1982, something really weird happened. Washington kicker Mark Moseley didn’t just pick up a stray MVP vote from a misguided writer. He won the damn award. A kicker. MVP. It really happened.
It’s unfair to say Moseley was a replacement-level talent; he was, as you might expect, a very good kicker that season. But the idea of a kicker being literally the most valuable football player in the NFL seems downright insane in 2015. Some of that is hindsight, but it’s worth using what we know now to go back and put Moseley’s shocking season in context. How good was he? Why did the electorate back him? And could any of this ever happen again?
The Year the NFL Went Insane and Gave a Kicker the MVP Award «