NFL midseason awards picks: Best players, rookies, coaches - ESPN

Let's hand out midseason awards for the NFL season. Having crunched the numbers and watched thousands of plays, I've seen an awful lot of football this year. I won't pretend I can explain how the Chiefs are 8-0, but as someone who predicted they would win 16 games, I'm not complaining. Better to be lucky than good.

Despite their record, the Chiefs don't really factor into this column, which is a product of them being a deep, talented team and having strengths in places that don't end up in awards columns, such as offensive line. In trying to evaluate every team, I'm going to nominate the occasional player who has excelled on an otherwise disappointing team.

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Keep in mind these are my picks for what I've seen through nine weeks this season, not my predictions for who the voters will pick at the end of the regular season. I consider some of these awards a little differently than the electorate, and I'll mention how my feelings differ in each section. There's a lot to get to, so I'm going to treat the Comeback Player of the Year award as a pre-ceremony honor and hand it to quarterback Kirk Cousins for his work with the 6-3 Atlanta Falcons. Let's start with the guys who roam the sideline and hand out an award to a coach who somehow hasn't won one of these during a Hall of Fame career:

Jump to an award:
MVP | Best coach
OROY | DROY
OPOY | DPOY

This award almost always goes to a coach whose team drastically outperforms its preseason win/loss predictions. Sometimes, that leads to Sean McVay (2017) or Jim Harbaugh (2011) earning this award. Other times, it has gone to Brian Daboll (2022) or Matt Nagy (2018). In other words, Coach of the Year appears to be a trophy for exceeding expectations.

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