Aaron Schatz's 2024 NFL Award Ballot

This was my fifth year as an official Associated Press voter for both the All-Pro team and the end-of-season awards. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a long article about my All-Pro votes. With the NFL awards now given out, I wanted to do the same and divulge my award ballot.

Remember that these awards are voted on prior to the postseason, and therefore only reflect what we knew about players and coaches at the end of the regular season. This year, we had five votes for every single award instead of five for MVP and three for the other awards, which was the setup in 2023.

Most Valuable Player

I am generally of the belief that the MVP is a quarterback award. Quarterbacks are the most valuable players in the game. If we wanted to give it to a player at another position, we would need to call this award something else or the Associated Press would need to give us specific guidance that we should consider a player’s value compared to the average at his position.

My All-Pro Ballot article included a long discussion of why I voted for Lamar Jackson over Josh Allen as my first-team All-Pro quarterback. The short version is that while many advanced stats had the two players neck and neck, DVOA and DYAR had Jackson with a clearly more valuable season.

I’m open to arguments that Jackson has better teammates and therefore Allen has to do more to carry his team, but I don’t know how valid they are. Yes, I’m about to vote for Derrick Henry for Offensive Player of the Year (spoiler alert) but James Cook is also very good. The Ravens probably have better receivers than the Bills, but they don’t really have great receivers or a deep receiver room. The Ravens and Bills were third and fourth, respectively, in ESPN’s pass block win rate, so that doesn’t seem like a big difference between the teams. Maybe the difference in teammates makes up a small gap in DYAR, but this was a much larger gap.

Joe Burrow had great volume stats but wasn’t as efficient on a play-by-play basis as Jackson and Allen. I added Patrick Mahomes to my ballot because of his effect on Win Probability Added. Usually, I don’t consider WPA in judging players because it’s so dependent on what your defense does or whether your own failures have kept the game close, but Mahomes just did some crazy things in that whole Chiefs streak of one-possession victories. I went with Jared Goff over Jayden Daniels for the last spot because Goff finished second in passing DYAR, although obviously he gets a lot of help from his scheme and teammates.

Offensive Player of the Year

Oh boy. I had a really hard time with this one. There were a lot of directions I could go here. You had the running backs with awesome seasons. You had Ja’Marr Chase winning the receiving triple crown. You had George Kittle with the second-best season since 1978 in tight end DYAR. I could have snuck Justin Jefferson or an offensive lineman onto my list too.

First, I have to explain choosing Derrick Henry over Saquon Barkley as my top running back. As I noted in the All-Pro Ballot article, Henry had a more efficient season against a much harder schedule than Barkley faced. Henry faced a top 10 run defense by DVOA in six games and a bottom 10 run defense four times. Barkley faced a top 10 run defense only three times and a bottom 10 run defense nine times. It was Henry who ended up having the best rushing DYAR season of the entire 21st century, surpassing the best Priest Holmes seasons and Jonathan Taylor from a couple of years ago.

Yes, having a mobile quarterback in Lamar Jackson helped open up running lanes for Henry. Guess what: having a mobile quarterback in Jalen Hurts also helped open up running lates for Barkley! That’s not a reason to choose Barkley over Henry. If anything, it would be a reason to choose Jahmyr Gibbs.

For my top spot, I decided to go with Henry over a Ja’Marr Chase season that was totally awesome but not quite as good as some other wide receivers in efficiency (as opposed to volume). I wanted Barkley’s 2,000-yard season to mean something, so I put him third and Kittle fourth and then Gibbs fifth. I switched these guys around a few times before I turned in my ballot.

Defensive Player of the Year

This is a lot of comparing apples to oranges, because I’ve got coverage DVOA to help measure Pat Surtain II and sacks and pressures to help measure Trey Hendrickson and all kinds of stats to help measure Zack Baun but how do I put them up against each other? In the end, I decided that a standout cornerback season was probably a little more valuable than a standout linebacker season, but that Baun had more impact on the entire Eagles defense improving than Hendrickson had on the Bengals defense. Maybe I was wrong to go that way since I went and put a second Broncos defender on my ballot (Allen) but yeah, that’s how I decided to go.

Offensive Rookie of the Year

There were so many good offensive rookie seasons this year. I couldn’t vote for Ladd McConkey or Zach Frazier because I had only five spots. I really did think about giving the top spot to Brock Bowers. Rookie of the Year doesn’t have to be a quarterback. This is more of a “best at his position” award. Our guidance tells us to vote for the player who had “the best all-around season.” So then the question is, which is worth more? Being the sixth- or seventh-best quarterback or being the second-best tight end? I decided the quarterback still had the better season, so Jayden Daniels got my top vote.

Joe Alt, by the way, finished fourth among tackles in ESPN’s pass block win rate as a rookie.

Defensive Rookie of the Year

Jared Verse is the kind of player where we can thank advanced stats for knowing how good he was this year. Verse had only 4.5 sacks. He didn’t even lead Rams rookies in sacks; Braden Fiske had 8.5 sacks to lead the team. But Verse was a pressure monster. Brandon Thorn has this thing he keeps called True Pressure Rate where he looks at pass pressures and separates them into low quality and high quality pressures depending on whether you are blocked and who you are going up against. Jared Verse was third in the league in True Pressure Rate behind Chris Jones and Myles Garrett. He led the NFL in fewest snaps per pressure.

For the rest of the choices, I went with some cornerbacks who were outstanding in my coverage DVOA stats. I think even after adjusting for slot receivers, it’s a bit harder to be an outside cornerback who is left one-on-one more often, so I boosted Quinyon Mitchell to the second spot. He was 16th in coverage DVOA. Tarheeb Still was third, Tykee Smith was sixth, and Cooper DeJean was eighth. In retrospect, I kind of wish I had found a spot on here for Miami edge rusher Chop Robinson, but at the same time I feel like Smith needs some love. Nobody really talked about the really good rookie year he had.

Coach of the Year

Dan Campbell
Kevin O’Connell
Andy Reid
Jim Harbaugh
Sean Payton

Last year, I think I wrote that I had like nine different guys I was considering for Coach of the Year. This year it was even more. This is a really hard award to decide on. Obviously, if we were including the postseason, I would have found a spot for Dan Quinn. Also, I was considering Mike Tomlin for much of the season. Tomlin is great at the aspects of coaching that we aren’t really measuring with analytics, like managing his locker room. It’s hard to know how much to criticize him for the team falling apart at the end of the season. We looked at the Pittsburgh schedule before the 2024 season and said, “This schedule is totally backloaded, the Steelers will look pretty good at midseason before they have problems.” Even though the Browns fell apart, this still proved to be true. But losing to the Browns was bad in Week 12, and I didn’t know where to put Tomlin on my ballot, and I felt like if you did Jim Harbaugh you really had to also do Sean Payton, so Tomlin got left off.

Anyway, Dan Campbell is awesome and the perfect combination of a locker-room motivator who also understands analytics. He’s close to the platonic ideal of what I want in a head coach right now. Kevin O’Connell had an incredible year, leading the Vikings to a 14-3 record and getting the most out of Sam Darnold. In the end, Campbell won the division so I gave him my top spot. Andy Reid deserves a lot of credit for keeping Kansas City strong year after year and for all those close victories. Yes, there’s a lot of luck involved, but also some coaching. Harbaugh and Payton turned around teams I thought would definitely have rebuilding years. I guess I felt that for the Commanders, the quarterback deserved more credit than the head coach, which is why I left Dan Quinn off this ballot while voting for Jayden Daniels as Offensive Rookie of the Year.

Assistant Coach of the Year

Brian Flores
Vic Fangio
Ben Johnson
Todd Monken
Aaron Glenn

I said a few times on social media this season that Brian Flores walked on water, so he’s my Assistant Coach of the Year. What he did with a Minnesota defense that didn’t feature many players that were even in the running for All-Pro was pretty awesome. I mean, in the end I ended up giving All-Pro votes to Andrew Van Ginkel and Byron Murphy Jr., but Flores put them there. Vic Fangio turned around the Eagles defense so he’s my No. 2. Ben Johnson always does an amazing job coordinating the Lions offense and we’ll have to see what he can do as a head coach now in Chicago. Todd Monken was in charge of one of the best offenses in DVOA history, so it feels weird to have him just fourth. I wanted Aaron Glenn on my ballot because of what he was able to do with the Detroit defense in the second half of the year despite all those injuries.

Comeback Player of the Year

Look, they told us not to vote for Sam Darnold. I don’t understand the people who voted for Sam Darnold. They told us not to do this! “The spirit of the award is to honor a player who has demonstrated resilience in the face of adversity by overcoming illness, physical injury or other circumstances that led him to miss playing time the previous season.” That means this is NOT a “Most Improved Player” award. I would love to have a Most Improved Player award. I would have voted for Sam Darnold for that award. This is not that award!

The Comeback Player of the Year award is always confusing because you have to decide between the best comeback and the best player. Of the players who were coming back from major injuries in 2023, I think Joe Burrow clearly had the best season.

I did put Damar Hamlin on my ballot even though his illness/injury was two years ago rather than last year, based on the idea that it took him two years to truly recover to the point where he was good enough to play regularly again.