2021 NFL MVP: Dallas Cowboys QB Dak Prescott leaps into first place

The NFL MVP race is much more chaotic than it was a year ago.

While last year was all about the three greats in Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson (with Wilson leaving the conversation later in the season), the quarterback play this year has been much more erratic.

After Josh Allen and Dak Prescott couldn’t get anything going in Week 9, Week 10 turned out to be a bad one for Lamar Jackson. Meanwhile, Kyler Murray can’t get back on the field at all right now, and Tom Brady just lost to a mediocre team with a mediocre quarterback.

All this could even bring back an almost forgotten quarterback: Patrick Mahomes.

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Before we get to the Week 11 NFL MVP rankings, here's a short overview of the methodology:

We trained a model to predict the winner of the MVP award based on only three regular-season parameters after Week 18 concludes:

1. The number of wins and how that ranks across the league
2. Rank in the division
3. Expected points added (EPA) per play and how that ranks across the league

Since the model works with regular-season stats in hindsight, we need to simulate the remaining games of the season to find results with which we can feed the model. So, we utilize PFF's weekly win total simulations and a Bayesian updating method to simulate each quarterback’s EPA per play.

During the season, we update our beliefs on all quarterbacks with Bayesian updating, incorporating up-to-date EPA per play and making adjustments based on PFF passing grade, our charting data — which can identify plays with bad results that aren't the quarterback's fault — and the quality of defense faced.

Using these updated beliefs, we can simulate the EPA per play for the remainder of the season for each quarterback.

The number of wins and whether a QB wins his division is obtained from our weekly win totals simulations.

The goal isn’t to describe who would be MVP if the season ended right now, but rather to predict who will have the best combination of individual stats and team wins at the end of the season.

Defense adjustments

First, we adjust for each defense to find which quarterbacks played the most difficult schedule (and receive the highest positive adjustments). Since it’s still early in the season, the defense adjustments are based on both opponent-adjusted performance this season as well as a prior from the offseason. With each passing week, the prior will play a smaller role and will be fully disregarded after eight weeks of play.

The defensive strengths of the teams lead to the following adjustments for quarterbacks (a positive adjustment means a difficult schedule so far; a negative adjustment means an easy schedule):

Of course, it’s also interesting to look at future strength of schedule based on the current strength of defenses. In this chart, a positive number means an easy future schedule (i.e., the team and its quarterback is supposed to generate more EPA due to playing easier defenses):

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