2025 NFL MVP: One candidate from each NFC 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.

Kyler Murray

I think Murray quietly had one of his best seasons last year, and he’s reaching the peak of his career just as the Cardinals appear to be rounding into form. They key to building on that might be avoiding those handful of dud games Arizona seems to have offensively with Murray at the helm. Shed those, and he and the team should be in decent shape.

Murray has yet to receive an MVP vote, but he has two enticing targets in TE Trey McBride and WR Marvin Harrison Jr., which could vault him to a career-best season. The Cardinals have their work cut out for them in the thorny NFC West, but there’s at least an MVP path for Murray if he can lead them back to prominence.

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