2025 NFL MVP: One candidate from each AFC team

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Since Adrian Peterson received MVP honors in 2012, the past 12 winners of the Associated Press award have been quarterbacks. QBs have dominated the accolade since its inception in 1957, earning 49 nods in the past 68 years — and the disparity has been even more slanted toward the position since the turn of the millennium.

But the chances for non-quarterbacks to win the award arguably have improved in recent years. MVP voting changed prior to the 2022 season, with voters ranking their top five choices in order. This tiered voting system has given us deeper and more diverse, nuanced sets of results each year since.

While it’s true that the only non-QB runners-up over the past 12 years (Todd Gurley in 2017, J.J. Watt in 2014) came prior to the voting changes, the past three years have seen 10 non-quarterbacks make the top 10: Saquon Barkley, Ja’Marr Chase, Christian McCaffrey, Tyreek Hill (twice), Myles Garrett, Justin Jefferson, Nick Bosa, Micah Parsons, A.J. Brown and Derrick Henry.

Odds are, the 2025 league MVP will be a quarterback. That’s reflected in our team-by-team nominees for the award, with 22 of the 32 players listed being signal-callers. They’re the overwhelming favorites in a lot of cases. But don’t forget about the other positions; I certainly tried not to, even while keeping reality between the crosshairs.

One of these years, we’ll even have our first defensive MVP since Lawrence Taylor in 1986, but we might not be quite ready for that again as a football-watching nation.

Lamar Jackson

He’s won the league’s MVP award twice already and finished second in 2024 voting to the Bills’ Josh Allen. Some argued Jackson was deserving of his third such award last year. Whatever your stance, Lamar is the clear and obvious choice here. And turning 29 years old late in this coming season, he’s now entering the phase of his career where most quarterbacks are at their relative peak. We can only imagine how much better Jackson can get, and there really isn’t another logical MVP choice in Baltimore.

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