Brock Purdy’s the betting favorite to win the NFL MVP award, and this is quite the turn of events. Those of us who watched Brock Purdy’s college career mostly appreciated it a lot, but he was always a good quarterback, never a great one, and he was especially not great when the pressure was highest. He had big wins, but one of his worst collegiate performances came in arguably Iowa State’s biggest football game of all time, the 2021 Cy-Hawk Game. There’s a funny incongruence here for Iowa State fans. We know the guy best, and what we know about him suggests he isn’t really the most valuable NFL player. Simultaneously, we desperately want him to be named the MVP. We have an even bigger interest than 49ers fans when it comes to Purdy winning an MVP. 49ers fans have a second candidate. 49ers fans have Christian McCaffrey. Iowa State fans have only Brock Purdy. Bring it home, Brock.
Does Purdy deserve it? I have no clue, and I think this is a good thing for football. The development of WAR in baseball, while a phenomenal mathematic achievement, made MVP debates less fun. We know how valuable Shohei Ohtani is, with a margin of error of only a couple wins in a 162-game sample. In football? I have a very poor idea of how valuable Brock Purdy is. My hunch is that we’re two or three years away from a serious MVP candidacy from an offensive lineman, but we aren’t there yet. Instead, Purdy is stumping for McCaffrey and Tyreek Hill is getting mentions but most serious alternatives to the 49ers’ starting quarterback—the quarterback with the best numbers, playing for the best team—are quarterbacks themselves.
Purdy’s MVP candidacy isn’t unlike Bo Nix’s Heisman case: He’s the perfect default. The numbers are phenomenal, and the wins buoy the case, but there are few moments of his which make you say, “Wow.” This is more Nick Foles winning the Super Bowl or early-stage Tom Brady than Lamar Jackson dazzling all over the field. In the case of Nix, the default case started to fall apart when voters went looking for an alternative and discovered just how electric Jayden Daniels was. With Purdy, all the alternatives are known quantities: Jackson. Dak Prescott. Josh Allen. Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes. Hill was intriguing but is is now hurt. McCaffrey is otherworldly but we’ve spent a lot of time the last few years learning how overvalued running backs historically have been. If Lamar Jackson does unbelievable things on Christmas night and the Ravens’ defense does what the Hawkeyes’ once did to senior-year Purdy, maybe things flip, but barring that, the award might be Purdy’s to lose.
Does Purdy deserve it? We ask again. By the historic rubric, he certainly does. He’s been the most successful offensive player. In terms of pure value, he probably isn’t the most valuable player in the NFL—the 49ers themselves might be better off with Sam Darnold under center than they were when Trent Williams was out—but Williams’s MVP candidacy does not right now exist.
Outside of 49ers fans and Iowa State fans, few are overhyping Purdy right now. Plenty are overcriticizing him. Does he have a cannon for an arm? No. Is he throwing to a lot of wide-open receivers? Yes. But he’s still making the throws, and that’s something Jimmy Garoppolo and Trey Lance didn’t always do in this Kyle Shanahan-led San Francisco offense. It’s not the “More Valuable than Garoppolo and Lance” award. But it’s never seriously been about picking the most valuable player. If Purdy wins, complaints are probably fair. But given a large share of complainers would be assuaged if Jackson won it, despite Jackson not being the most valuable player either, those complainers might be even more flawed in their thinking. It’s one thing to award the MVP to a default QB. It’s another to only award it to a default QB if that QB has huge free agent value. That’s doing the same thing, but worse.
Joe Barry Update: Still Here
Matt LaFleur said today he isn’t going to fire Joe Barry, and in a roundabout way he took some of the blame himself for the Packers putting together one of the worst defensive showings in franchise history, chalking the loss up to communication problems. He acknowledged the oddness of some Barry play calls, but the Packers will not be making a change.
I don’t know if shaking it up would help at this point, and I’m not sure the Packers’ defense is full-on the worst in the league right now, though it’s certainly had a horrible two weeks. I’m agnostic on what the right move is at this stage. Long-term? Yeah, you have to get rid of Barry. But I don’t mind if the Packers aren’t there yet. What I have been wondering is this, and LaFleur’s communication comments made me think about it again:
I wonder if LaFleur sees so many issues with the Packers as a whole right now that trying to make a change at defensive coordinator seems like a task too big. There’s energy needed on the communication issues. There’s energy needed on personnel decisions and contingency plans. There’s energy needed, still, on the offense, which isn’t abominable like it was early in the year but is far from flawless. I see the angle for the conspiracy theory that LaFleur wants to keep his ace in his hand and fire Barry once the season is over, as a sacrifice of penance for underperforming down the stretch, but I think it’s more possible LaFleur is overwhelmed, and that with defense not his history, he really doesn’t want to mess with even a bottom-five defense (if that’s what it is). This is a little bit what our theory was last week. But we’re adding the thought that LaFleur finds himself struggling to patch all the other holes. It’s like a sailor leaving the mast cracked for the time being because he has to stitch back up the sail. In the long run, you need both, but right now, there’s a chance the ship keeps moving if the sail is intact.
Are Mid-Major Coaches Full of Shit?
Using the kenpom metric for it, FAU managed to put together the 56th-toughest nonconference strength of schedule this nonconference season, managing to play three likely NCAA Tournament teams plus a few aimed towards bubble, all on neutral floors. Which makes me ask the question written above.
There’s a strong tradition in college basketball of mid-major teams narrowly missing the NCAA Tournament and their head coaches blaming high-majors for being scared to schedule them. It’s a believable claim—the risk of playing a feisty mid-major can be high for power conference teams, especially with bigger conference schedules increasing the risk of finishing something like 17–16 despite having an otherwise tournament-worthy résumé. (There’s a risk, in other words, of having *too* strong a schedule.) At the same time, though, it’s hard to prove teams won’t schedule you, and it’s easy to blame people other than yourself.
Something probably working to FAU’s scheduling advantage is just how much hype they were receiving this offseason. Scheduling a mid-major that was just in the Final Four is less optically risky than scheduling the reigning Missouri Valley runner-up (I’m thinking of those Illinois State teams in the mid-2010s). FAU isn’t quite as good as the preseason AP Poll indicated, but the AP Poll reflects the groupthink, and the groupthink held that FAU would be a great team and an asset on the résumé, more like Gonzaga than UAB. Still, FAU isn’t a marquee opponent in terms of crowd interest, like Duke or Arizona or Indiana. Its downside is massive, with plenty of chances in AAC play to acquire a disastrous loss. And FAU didn’t have trouble getting good teams to play them. It’s enough to make us ask the question.
Can Dylan Raiola Save Nebraska?
No.
But!
Getting commitments from five-star recruits is a great way to be good at college football, especially if you’re getting those commitments and you have a good coach coaching them. I’d venture Matt Rhule is probably a pretty good coach. We saw Chip Kelly come back from the NFL a lesser version of what he once was, and that might be true of Rhule, but we also saw Nick Saban come back from the NFL, and we remember how that went.
What Raiola really signifies for Nebraska is that they have the NIL resources available to sign a five-star here and there, and that they have the leverage to unlock that money. It’s possible this is a little like Notre Dame—who could pay for Sam Hartman and Riley Leonard as transfers but hasn’t locked up a single five-star since NIL was legalized—and that Nebraska donors will only shell out for quarterbacks, preferably big-name ones others have soured on upon digging in deep. Still, Nebraska landed a five-star, and generally, places that land one five-star can land two. Nebraska was in the top 25 this year in the 247Sports Talent Score. They’re only in the top 25 in the Class of ’24 recruiting rankings, but they’re at least holding ground, and this is a demonstration of upside. It took Rhule three years to win ten games at both Temple and Baylor.
The Glasnow Extension Looks Bad
We missed this alongside the trade, but the Dodgers signed Tyler Glasnow to an extension, and…I don’t know, guys. Glasnow is entering his age-30 season, has never been worth more than 3.2 fWAR in a season, and is now set to earn a 3.5-WAR salary by the old $8M/WAR number? That number is probably rising a little, but the most basic modeling of Glasnow’s production from here through the end of the deal says he’ll average 1.0 WAR per season, and a modeling based off of FanGraphs’s current projection—which says he’ll best his previous highest innings total by 28%—says he’ll average only 2.7 WAR per season. In other words: If Glasnow stays perfectly healthy, the Dodgers are overpaying him by something like six million dollars per year. If Glasnow gets hurt at a rate matching that of his career so far, the Dodgers are overpaying him by something like twenty million dollars per year.
To this, Dodgers fans likely say, “We don’t care! We are one of two teams in baseball that doesn’t care about the luxury tax!” But the Dodgers do care about the luxury tax. They just spent a year resisting the temptation to fix their dilapidated rotation so they could, with clear conscience, spend all that money on Shohei Ohtani. If they didn’t care about the luxury tax, they would have tried to win the World Series and then sign Ohtani anyway. Money is closer to infinite with the Dodgers than with anyone save possibly the Mets. But being close to infinite isn’t the same thing as being infinite. At some point, a bad contract can still hurt you. I cannot fathom signing Tyler Glasnow to years beyond this year, and I struggle to believe the trade was contingent from the Rays’ side on an extension happening.
