Photo Via: Las Vegas Review-Journal
Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes had a sensational MVP season this year, garnering 82% of all the votes. The NFL MVP is a prestigious award with a storied history. Although there are other MVP Awards in the NFL, the AP Award is commonly known as the main one and the most prestigious. The award started in 1957.
In this article, I will be listing players based on their cumulative NFL MVP Shares. What is that you may ask? Well, MVP Shares are pretty simple as it is simply Votes/Max Votes Possible.
For Example, the 2017 MVP Voting was as follows, Tom Brady 40 votes, Todd Gurley 8 votes, and Carson Wentz 2 votes. There were 50 votes total there for Tom Brady had .8 MVP Shares, Todd Gurley had .16 MVP Shares, while Carson Wentz had .04. I calculated these for every MVP race since the implementation of the award in 1957. However, there was some estimation involved for certain years, as the full voting or none at all was not available for a small amount of them. I used https://mvpvoting.wordpress.com/2011-2018/, for my data as they have nearly every MVP Race with the exact voting breakdown.
The estimation was tricky and my method is not perfect, however here is an explanation for how I calculated the shares for the years in which the full data was not available.
1985: The Award voting for Marcus Allen (33 Votes), and Walter Payton (25 votes) was indeed available. However it is known that Roger Craig and Dan Marino both garnered votes, but the exact number is not published. Therefore I used the last available total votes for my calculations. This was 1983, where there were a total of 84 votes. Therefore I calculated Allen’s and Payton’s as usual: 33/84 and 25/84. For the last two, I simply divided the rest evenly between Marino and Craig such that: it was 13/84 for both of them.
1984: 1984 Followed the same adjustments as in 1985. Only the exact votes of Dan Marino (52) and Erick Dickerson (18) were known, but Walter Payton received an unknown # of votes. Therefore I allocated the remaining 14 votes to Payton.
1977 and 1976 both had unknown vote-getters, and I used a total of 84 for both of them.
1975: This was one of the harder ones to estimate as, all we knew was who won the award (Fran Tarkenton), the runner-up (OJ Simpson) and the other players who received votes. Therefore I allocated 84 total votes and based the distribution of these votes on the 1976 finish. Therefore Tarkenton received 41/84, OJ Simpson 19/84, and the rest were allocated evenly.
1971: 1971 had available voting details for the winner Alan Page (16 Votes), Roger Staubach (10), Ottis Taylor (10), Bob Griese (9), Billy Kilmer (4), Boby Lily (1), and Carl Eller (1), However Larry Csonka, Paul Warfield, Len Dawson, John Hadl, John Brodie, and Greg Landry also received votes. Therefore I adjusted the total vote tally from 51 to 57 and allocated one vote to each of the six remaining people.
1970: 1970 had available voting details for the winner John Brodie (33 Votes), George Blanda (27), Alan Page (3), and Fran Tarkenton (3). Nine players also received votes, for the remaining 9 I allocated one each with a new total of 75.
1961: In 1961 we knew that Paul Hornung won the award, and six other players received votes. We also knew the order in which the rest received votes. Therefore I used the distribution from 1968.
1960: There were no voting numbers available for this year however Norm Van Brocklin and Joe Schidmt were co MVP-Winners. Therefore I just allocated shares of .5 to both of them.
With no further ado here is the all-time NFL leaderboard in MVP Win Shares:
Tyler's Basic Sports Metrics 