NFL Honors are tonight!

9:00 pm ET from the Resorts World Theater in Vegas.

Keegan Michael Key hosting again, you can catch it on CBS, NFL Network, NFL+, Paramount+ and Fubo.

Sources on the ground (Drew) have said we will have to wait a bit for the comeback player of the year as the closing order is expected to be that followed by MVP.

Lessons Learned

It’s always good to be a bit introspective about your process, and again, similar to some of the props I’m going to place this weekend, I like to win money, but it’s still fun to take some longer shots just to “say you had that ticket”.

Lessons learned/things I will try to keep in mind for 2024 awards:

MVP: I think the biggest takeaway from the last couple of years may be just how hard the MVP market tilted late in the season based on some teams locking up the one seeds with late-season runs.

Brock Purdy falling off hard after losing to the Ravens wasn’t exactly the same situation as Jalen Hurts missing a couple of games late last year, but both are probably good reasons to not chase presumptive favorites at bad prices in the middle of the season.

OPOY: looking at the fourth straight year for this being the “best non-QB”. Probably employ the same strategy as last year with a couple of high-volume players who will get talked about as MVP candidates but realistically can’t win MVP. This is the only one I’ll be getting right this year.

DPOY: Thought our process was good preseason taking Micah Parsons, but the Diggs injury and his lack of “big plays” doomed that. So the handicap was close: We said a “player who has never won this award before on a defense that is viewed as tough” and Myles Garrett meets those criteria.

OROY: I tried to blame 2022’s horrific QB class for messing with my head on this one, but in the long run, if a QB is good at all, he’s winning. There was always the risk of injury (it literally happened!), but chasing steam on a QB midseason might not be dumb. I will still take long shots on WRs in good situations, I just ended on Jayden Reed and Rashee Rice instead of Puka.

DROY: Maybe I’m off base with this, but did it feel like no one really paid attention to who should win for like the first 10 weeks? Jalen Carter started off decent, moved to the favorite, and other guys just sat behind him until late in the year when it became apparent there were better players on better defenses. For sure something I want to monitor through the first half of the season again in ‘24

COY: This one seems fickle, and it’s sort of funny that while DeMeco did a great job this year, I wonder how much of his campaign was aided by the Jaguars falling apart. I picked this in the Discord as my “upset special” for tonight, as I think Stefanski is more deserving, but who knows. I really thought the Lions winning for the first time in forever was worth something. Maybe the fact that they were meeting expectations rather than exceeding them tempered that a bit.

CBPOY: This award goes back into “who knows what this actually means” territory next year. I’ll take some punts on QBs but I wonder what prices will look like for Cousins, Rodgers, Burrow, Jones, Herbert, and Watson. Loaded crop next year, it’ll be a ton of fun to argue about who’s injury is the most deserving!

Overall, I asked Drew what his biggest takeaway was and he came back with “The awards voting discourse was pretty rough on social media... if you have a bet that's fine but shut up about it and tone down the campaigning and chill out when people disagree”

It lends itself to making a guy wonder how much the discourse plays into things. There are a number of voters who are active enough on social media to be taking in those sorts of things on the regular and there’s a non-zero chance that it has and will tilt voting, even a little bit.

Our Votes

These don’t matter either, but I asked Drew to put together a ballot anyway. He went a bit off the reservation and even threw in a Walter Payton Man of the Year Ballot. Feel free to yell at me about my choices.

Discord Results

I put together a ballot for the members of the Deep Dive Degens Discord and sent it around. I will say I messed up in numerous ways ruining the scientific process altogether. Next year will be better! Need to get the ballots sent out at the end of the season rather than the Wednesday of the Super Bowl. That said, there were some surprising results with the ranked-choice voting.

Our voting totals will be higher than the actual numbers from tonight (we had more voters and we only gave them five options). Some very interesting results though with the Discord voting Stefanski over Ryans for Coach of the Year and the Comeback vote being wildly close with the ranked-choice points closing the gap.

In case you were wondering how our voting went:

MVP

Voters selected their top five, 1st place votes earned 10 points, 2nd - 5, 3rd - 3, 4th - 2, 5th - 1. Just like the NFL’s actual voting process.

Lamar Jackson: 761 (69 1st place votes)

Josh Allen: 335 (5)

Brock Purdy: 302 (8)

Christian McCaffrey: 209 (3)

Dak Prescott: 199 (1)

Offensive Player of the Year

For the rest of the awards, we ranked just THREE players/coaches (again, same as the NFL). 1st place vote was worth 5, 2nd - 3, 3rd - 1.

Christian McCaffrey: 367 (60)

Tyreek Hill: 261 (20)

CeeDee Lamb: 132 (6)

Lamar Jackson: 132 (0)

Dak Prescott: 0 (0)

Defensive Player of the Year

Myles Garrett: 392 (73)

T.J. Watt: 209 (9)

Micah Parsons: 94 (2)

Maxx Crosby: 73 (2)

DeRon Bland: 6 (0)

Offensive Rookie of the Year

C.J. Stroud: 410 (76)

Puka Nacua: 276 (10)

Sam LaPorta: 56 (0)

Jahmyr Gibbs: 29 (0)

Bijan Robinson: 3 (0)

Defensive Rookie of the Year

Will Anderson Jr.: 343 (59)

Jalen Carter: 202 (17)

Kobie Turner: 110 (4)

Devon Witherspoon: 91 (4)

Joey Porter Jr.: 28 (2)

Coach of the Year

Kevin Stefanski: 294 (40)

DeMeco Ryans: 261 (31)

Dan Campbell: 141 (10)

Kyle Shanahan: 65 (4)

John Harbaugh: 13 (1)

Comeback Player of the Year

Damar Hamlin: 279 (50)

Baker Mayfield: 244 (21)

Joe Flacco: 136 (10)

Matthew Stafford: 63 (5)

Tua Tagovailoa: 52 (0)