NFL end of season awards: Rodgers’ reign and Stafford’s Super Bowl surge

Over the past two years, the NFL’s old guard has cycled out, making way for a new generation of stars. Future hall of famers Ben Roethlisberger, Drew Brees and Tom Brady have left the building. Aaron Rodgers continues to tease that he may follow the trio out of the door.

In their place is a new crop of quarterbacks. Adding to the intrigue: the talent is concentrated in one conference. Draw up any top-eight quarterback list, and the names Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, Justin Herbert, Joe Burrow, and Lamar Jackson will appear in some order. And who knows, there’s a chance that one of Trevor Lawrence, Mac Jones and Zach Wilson willjoin the party over the next couple of years.

After back-to-back playoff battles, the Allen-Mahomes rivalry has slotted neatly into the void left by the near-annual Brady-Manning matchup. Adding Burrow, Herbert, and Jackson to the mix is just unfair.

The AFC is swamped with the game’s best and brightest. The next 10 years are set to produce some of the finest quarterback duels the playoffs have ever seen, featuring a rotating cast of five rather than the league’s most fearsome twosome.

There is no wrong answer here. You can take Rodgers or Brady. If you want to doff the hipster cap, maybe look to Cooper Kupp for his third-down impact on a Rams offense that was otherwise up-and-down for the bulk of the year.

Still: It’s an award about value, and the quarterback is indisputably the most valuable player on the field. Rodgers edges Brady out in the most compelling advanced metrics. The EPA+CPOE Composite, which tracks the down-to-down value of each play and attempts to isolate the quarterback’s impact on those plays (using the Completion Over Expectation metric thanks to the tracking chips in the