‘Tis the season and all! As the weather outside gets frightful and visions of sugarplums dance in our heads, we know that’s time for that most hallowed of traditions – complaining about the NFL’s Pro Bowl balloting.

OK, yes, yes, the Pro Bowl game doesn’t matter, which is why they got rid of it several years ago. The “Pro Bowl Games” are a fun little diversion; a throwback to the era of the Battle of the Network Stars and whatnot, but it’s entirely skippable. The audience seems to back that up, with viewership for the flag football part of it dropping 8% down to 5.75 million last year. It’s fun, sure, but entirely inessential. Do you even remember who won last year? I certainly don’t!

But Pro Bowl nominations do matter. They’re used as a quick shorthand for player quality in Hall of Fame arguments – Eli Manning made four, Luke Keuchly made seven, and so on and so forth. They help us judge players from eras before we were watching; knowing that Dan Fouts made six Pro Bowls while Terry Bradshaw made three helps us understand how these players were viewed at the time. They matter in contract negotiations, in contract bonuses, and just in general prestige. Sure, no one really cares who actually makes the trip to Orlando but being able to refer to someone as a “five-time Pro Bowler” or whathaveyou matters in conversations, both official and unofficial. So it’s a shame when someone like Tyler Huntley ends up taking a Pro Bowl slot and becomes a trivia answer like Mike Boryla (1975) or Jeff Saturday (2012) rather than a legitimate reflection of their play in that season.

This is where we’d normally encourage you to take your ballot seriously but that ship has long since sailed – the NFL doesn’t even take their own ballot seriously. The league’s official ballot lets you vote for six players at every position, with no regard to conference affiliation. That means you can’t actually fill out a Pro Bowl roster, as you’ll be missing two receivers and two cornerbacks. It also allows you to do ridiculous things like name the six best long snappers or decide which three eligible fullbacks should not get a vote. The ballot doesn’t include all viable candidates – injured players can’t be voted on, and some players like Tarheeb Still are missing entirely. They also have yet to take a page out of the AP’s playbook and switched to an edge rusher-interior linemen-linebacker format, so we continue to pretend that T.J. Watt and Myles Garrett play fundamentally different positions. Sure.

Well, we can make lemons out of lemonade, and help you fill out your ballot anyway. The voting deadline is December 23, so we’ve got to buckle up pick the best of the best and brightest of the brightest. We’ll ignore the ballot’s arbitrary position limit (you can vote via social media, anyway), and give you one man’s take on the ideal 44-man rosters to send to Orlando. At least, until half of them back out because they’re hurt or in the Super Bowl, at any rate.

All stats through Week 15.

Offense

Quarterbacks

The AFC might be the easiest ballot in history. Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson are leading the MVP conversation, and Joe Burrow is leading the league in volume. They’re all in the top four in passing DYAR and are 1-2-3 in adjusted DYAR which includes rushing value. Burrow does fall all the way to fifth in passing DVOA, but as no one else in the conference is even in the top 12, we’ll give him a pass for that. If you really wanted to blast Burrow for a lack of QBWinz, you could make a case for Justin Herbert, as he has the Chargers winning despite a lack of elite receiving talent around him, but you would just be trying to make an argument for the sake of making an argument. It’s a fairly unimpeachable top three.

Especially compared to the NFC, which is a right mess. The closest thing to a clear-cut leader would be Jared Goff, who is second in passing DYAR (1,198), third in passing DVOA (28.1%), and fourth in adjusted DYAR (1,190; he’s no runner). He’s also the lead quarterback for a 12-2 team, just threw for 500 yards, and is at least hanging on in the MVP conversation. Open and shut case, right? Well, not every advanced metric loves Goff equally. DVOA doesn’t adjust for scheme or system; attempts to adjust EPA to handle those issues tend to ding Goff for having sure-handed receivers who pick up tons of YAC. Goff is second in the league in passing yards, but just 15th in catchable air yards and he’s just 29th in ALEX at -1.9, throwing shorter towards the sticks than almost every other starter in the league. Goff ranks low in SIS’s total points scored metric, in PFF’s grades, and in subjective QB power rankings around the league – he doesn’t pass the eye test as much as his raw numbers do. And, if he played in the AFC, that might be a good argument to keep Burrow above him despite the difference in team success. But am I really going to stand here, look at the landscape of quarterbacks in the NFC, and try to argue that Goff isn’t one of the top three quarterbacks in the conference? Well, I guess ESPN does have an opening now that they’re cancelling Around the Horn, but I don’t think I can Embrace that much Debate.

Finding a trio to go with him, though, is difficult. There are six NFC quarterbacks between 757 and 944 adjusted DYAR, a gap of less than 200 which is far from enough to make any definitive ranking of them based purely on numbers alone. In descending DYAR order, Kyler Murray, Jordan Love, Jayden Daniels, Baker Mayfield, Matthew Stafford, Brock Purdy and Sam Darnold all have legitimate Pro Bowl cases in a down year for the conference. This was the hardest decision on the entire ballot, and I decided to break the tie by picking the two players I least expected to be in this conversation at the beginning of the year. That would be Daniels, who has cooled off a little but is still already among the top 10 rookie passing DYARs in NFL history, and Darnold, who has turned from trash to treasure when given a new chance in Minnesota. Really, though, you have an argument for anyone here.

AFC: Josh Allen, BUF; Joe Burrow, CIN; Lamar Jackson, BAL
NFC: Jayden Daniels, WAS; Sam Darnold, MIN; Jared Goff, DET