Ranking NFL MVP candidates, awards picks through Week 9 of 2023 - ESPN

We've made it to the midway point of the NFL season. One-hundred and thirty-five of the 272 regular-season games we will see this season have been played; the Chargers-Jets game on «Monday Night Football» officially will get us 50% of the way through the campaign.

It has been a weird season. Teams that have been anointed as the best in football typically have lost in ignominious fashion the next week. Breakout quarterbacks have fallen back to the pack. One of the two dramatic victories from the early slate Sunday came when Joshua Dobbs led the Vikings, his third team in three months, to a win over the Falcons. We sent the Chiefs and Dolphins to light up the scoreboard in Germany and had two of the league's most exciting offenses produce a total of 28 points.

If you don't know which teams are actually great or who should be the league MVP after nine weeks of football, well, join the club. Today, though, I'm going to take a crack at the latter problem and hand out my midseason awards.

I'll be naming my picks and top two runners-up for Coach of the Year, Offensive and Defensive Rookie of the Year and Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year before finishing up with my MVP selection. Keep in mind this is my pick based on what each player has done through the first nine games of the season. I'm not projecting what these players will do over the rest of the season or what the actual voters will do at the end of the campaign, although I discuss a player's chances of winning the real hardware when things are said and done in January.

This is an annual exercise for me, as are my quarter-season awards every year after Week 4. There are times when a player goes wire-to-wire and wins the quarter-, half- and full-season awards, but