The NFL has a lot of nebulously defined awards; I will be the first one to acknowledge this. Is MVP supposed to go to the best player in the league, or the best player on the best team, or the literal most valuable player in terms of wins above replacement, or the most popular player? Is Coach of the Year supposed to go to the league's best coach, or the league's most improved coach, or the league's most popular coach? Does Comeback Player of the Year apply to injuries or down seasons? And what the hell is Offensive Player of the Year? (The answers, in order, are: the most popular, the most popular, apparently both, and MVP Alternate.)
There are, however, some awards that are NOT subjective or confusing. For instance, AP's First-Team All Pro award is not confusing. It goes to the best player(s) at the given position in the league. Period. That's it. It's the best player at that position.
Which makes it weird that AP just named Cam Newton their First-Team All-Pro Quarterback.
Cam Newton is going to win MVP. The media anointed him about a month and a half ago. The argument is as simple as it is stupid: Cam's team was undefeated at that stage, and he was their quarterback. As the year drew to a close, Cam started playing well for the first time all season, and the media anointed him even harder.
Here's the argument for Cam, in bullet points.
- His team went 15-1, which is the best record in the league. They started 14-0, which is one of the best starts ever. That's pretty impressive by any standards, and since the QB is the most important player on almost every team, surely Cam deserves some props.
- He was reasonably successful passing and running the ball, coming close to the league lead in both passing and rushing TDs despite having not-great efficiency stats. He was responsible for a lot of scoring and scoring is important.
- He's ostensibly extremely valuable to his team.
- Every so often the sports media decides to go nuts over a rushing quarterback. They usually pick the wrong ones. This year they've picked Cam.
Okay. I don't like any of those arguments, but I get them. I understand how someone might, if not reasonably, then at least semi-reasonably arrive at the conclusion that Newton was the most valuable player in the league last year. But here's the thing.
None of those arguments said that "Cam Newton is the best quarterback in the league."
That's because he wasn't. A quarterback's primary job is to pass the ball, and in passing categories Newton does not perform well. In cmp% he is 28th, in yds 16th, in TDs t-2nd, in TD% 1st, in int% 13th, in Y/A 8th, in AY/A 6th, in PR 8th, in QBR 9th, in NY/A 12th, and in ANY/A 6th.
In advanced statistics Newton doesn't perform much better. He's 11th in DYAR and 12th in DVOA, and although he's 1st in rushing DYAR it isn't by nearly as much as you think; he leads with 142 to Tyrod Taylor's 133 and Russell Wilson's 122 (and yes, this takes into account his 10 rushing TDs). Meanwhile Newton has produced 621 DYAR through the air to Wilson's 1,192, Brady's 1,311, and Palmer's 1,702.
In fact I frequent some pretty biased parts of the web, and I don't think I've even seen someone claim that Newton was the best quarterback in the league this year. I've seen: "Newton is the Panthers' whole offense," and "Stats don't tell the whole story (until Cam put up big numbers in these last few games)," and my personal favorite because of how blatantly ignorant it is, "Put anyone else on those Panthers and they win 4 games." Sure. On a 15-1 team, with five other First-Team All-Pros. But the point is, no one is claiming that Newton is actually the best QB in the league this year.
So... Why is Cam the First-Team All-Pro quarterback??? It baffles me. (I mean, I know why; it's because it looks weird not to give FTAP to the MVP, even if he doesn't deserve it. That's just a terrible reason.) It's been shown time and time again that passer rating is the stat most highly correlated with victory, and passer rating differential (i.e. offensive passer rating minus defense passer rating) has a very high correlation with winning championships. So passer rating is a really good thing to go by when rating quarterbacks. Newton, again, is 8th in PR, a solid 10.9 points behind the leader, Russell Wilson. The other legitimate FTAP candidates, Carson Palmer and Tom Brady, ranked 3rd and 4th respectively.
Cam Newton ranks 8th in passer rating. That is the WORST ranking of any First-Team All-Pro quarterback since 1970.
That's right. In fact in those 46 years there have only been four instances of a quarterback outside the top 5 in PR earning FTAP. All but six finished top-three, and all but eleven finished top-two. But sure, he has rushing contributions, right? Except his rushing achievements barely outstrip Wilson's, who not only finished 3rd in rushing DYAR and outperformed Cam in virtually every meaningful passing stat, while simultaneously hard-carrying his team to the playoffs*, but also led the league in Passer Rating, and got snubbed from BOTH All-Pro teams.
(*Cam did NOT carry his team. You can tell because the Panthers won their first eight games while Cam put up an 81.4 Passer Rating. If he were actually that valuable, they'd have lost those games and only started winning when he started playing well.)
Straight from the headlines, many years in the future:
"Russell Wilson cures cancer, solves Middle East crisis, and receives Nobel Peace Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and Fields Medal. Cam Newton named Time's Person of the Year."
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