Behind the Ballot

What if I told you that the player that broke the FCS all-time scoring record through nine years on a 10-3 team did not win MVP? Would you believe me? Well what if I followed that up by saying the owner of that player didn’t even campaign for him to win because he felt he wasn’t deserving? 

I think part of me is still surprised by how this race went down, not necessarily because of the results, but more so because of how it wasn’t a race at all. Lamar Jackson, after breaking arguably the most coveted individual FCS award we have, was an after thought after garnering only 16% of the votes compared to Saquon’s 47% share in last year’s MVP showdown. So what happened? 

My curiosity and bewilderment on why I was the only owner campaigning for my rival’s star led me here. As we approach our 2025 award voting season, it feels like as good a time as any to examine our history of award winners and those that came up just short to try and understand what we value as a voting body. Maybe taking a deep dive into our rich history of democracy will give me a new outlook on last year’s race and ease my perplexity.

For this exercise, we are going to examine our top three individual awards: Sleeper, Rookie, and MVP. Nine years of data will help us shape and draw conclusions on what statistics we value over all else to choose our winners, and I would venture to guess that might vary from award to award. 

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Kurt Warner Sleeper Award

We are currently on a five-year running back streak with no signs of slowing down. As a league we have really leaned into points being a dominating metric for this award. We want our sleepers to show up and score big and consistently with the winner never finishing outside of the top 10 positionally in scoring. After that, things get a little muddy.

Here is how our winners have fared in our main categories compared to their runner up. The percentage shown represents how often the winner led the runner-up in that category across our illustrious history.

Our big takeaways here are that team success is thrown out the door with an average win percentage of just over 60% and the winner having more wins only 38% of the time. Sheesh. If this metric is important to you across the board, you have some campaigning to do. 

Positional rank and start percentage are also surprisingly low here as we compare the top two vote getters with winners leading those stat lines less than 33% of the time. The numbers don’t lie here; if you want to win the Sleeper Award, you just gotta score. No playoffs, no starts. Just have them on your roster and score, score, score.

Points are king. It doesn’t matter if you shine as the winner of the Diamond Draft or become the coveted waiver wire add, if you don’t put up points at a pace that laps your preseason value, this is not the award for you.

What we value:

⬆️ PPG, Point Share

⬇️ Start Percentage, Positional Rank

What I would change:

There are some awards that you flat out expect start percentages to be high making them less critical in comparison. Our sleeper award is not one of those. 

With an abysmal 38% of sleepers leading in start percentage, I would implore that we look deeper into this metric and raise how we value winners getting on the field. Finding diamonds in the rough is critical in this league, but trusting them to do it in your starting lineup is even more valuable. Let’s push to reward owners more who have the gumption to trust their sleepers to score for them early and often.

According to our historical data, here are the minimum values to consider when selecting future winners for the Kurt Warner Sleeper Award.

Randy Moss Rookie Award

The first thing to note is how similar some of these figures are to the Sleeper averages. Positional rank, team win % and team total points rank all fall in the same tight range. Our differences lie with some interesting categories. First off, all individual rookie player stats are down compared to sleeper. So if player stat totals mean a little less, and sleepers are historically running backs, you might be able to draw the conclusions that we could have more positional parody for this catego- nope all RB’s except Bowers.

The primary outlier is one that makes a lot of sense to me; start percentage. Rookies are volatile. Our Rookie Draft, although a highlight of the new era FCS, has created a sense of urgency for these newbies. We want to see a return on our draft capital sooner rather than later, and that just isn’t realistic for the majority of these prospects. When evaluating the Rookie Award, we can clearly see with an 82% start percentage average that when voting we need to see the winning owner trust those rooks week in and week out. 

Here is how our rookie winners have fared in our main categories compared to their runner up.

More of the same here. Start percentage is king while PPG and point share struggle to make an impact. It’s interesting that points scored are lower and also less valued when comparing rookies. 

What we value:

⬆️ Start Percentage

⬇️ Points Per Game, Point Share

What I would change:

Forgive me for sounding like a broken record, but I love how start percentage plays such a prevalent role in our voting history. The bottom line is talk is cheap and we show our trust in rooks through their starts. Do our point metrics being maxed out at 50% bother you, though? 

According to our historical data, here are the minimum values to consider when selecting future winners for the Randy Moss Rookie Award.

Joe Montana MVP Award

We have a lot of fun things to examine here. First, probably our most glaring statistical consistency of all awards sits with the positional player rank. Our MVP has finished first positional every single year with the exception of 2017 and Carson Wentz who finished second. In case you were wondering, Tucson’s Russell Wilson finished first with seven more points than Wentz on the season. Wilson was a journeyman that season as he was traded three times, including starting with the Javies before being traded twice before heading back to Tucson at the deadline. This lack of consistency, combined with spending most of his season leading a flailing Austin team, made Wentz a more compelling candidate despite him being widely viewed as our least prestigious MVP in FCS history.

Another shift from the other award is the positional parody we see with MVP. Our historical breakdown has quarterbacks winning 4, running backs taking 5, and receivers with 1. I also wanted to point out that our singular example of a tight end popping up was in 2022 when Travis Kelce finished second in MVP with 24% of the votes after he broke the single season TE point record that still stands untouched today. Predicting positional outcomes here has and will continue to be difficult with so much variance, which is a great thing. Kelce’s run in ‘22 and Hill’s victory the following year shows that points are not king and it’s not always a race for points. Showing up and showing out against your positional opponents could ultimately drive the narrative for you to make your case.

So what else stands out? Well a couple things that you would expect. First, the individual player stats are leagues above the other awards. The MVP PPG average is up over 65% from the other categories and point share is 6.5% higher. So even though we have seen blips in the status quo like Tyreek, we are looking at league winners the majority of the time.

As far as team success goes, we finally start to see those figures rising. Team win percentage is up a decent amount as well as team total points ranking. Unlike sleeper and rookie, your team winning and scoring points plays a role in how owners view your worthiness to take home the coveted MVP Award.

Here is how our winners have fared in our main categories compared to their runner up.

The first thing that catches my eye is how we have no figures less than 50%. As far as points per game goes, our winners have won this battle all but once thanks to Tyreek Hill. If we remove that exception, we can bank on the player with the higher PPG taking the cake.

Team win percentage appears to be our other clear indicator of how we vote as a league. Jonathan Taylor’s 2021 victory with Tucson is our only example of someone winning against a player (Cooper Kupp) on a team (The Bronx) with a better record, although it’s important to note they did finish 1, 2 respectfully. 

Start percentage isn’t much of a factor in comparison here because with an award like this it is expected as the winner averages above 90%. 

Overall, there aren’t many surprises with this one and it’s a lot of what you’d expect. We value points per game above all else, and if you aren’t finishing at the top of your position rankings it’s going to be hard to make a case.

What we value:

⬆️ PPG, Team Win Percentage

⬇️ Point Share, Start Percentage

What I would change:

I would love to take this opportunity to advocate for point share, which we really haven’t discussed yet. Scoring points is the easiest stat to point to when we are contemplating a winner, but these “secondary” metrics like start percentage and point share can team up to tell a compelling story. These categories can often showcase the real value a player brings to their team in a deeper way than just how much they scored. When looking over point share, you can examine how critical each player is to their team’s actual success, and that is getting closer to pointing at what a true MVP really is, the most valuable player. You would expect the MVP to mean the most to that team, right? Historically, year over year, our results have said yes to that. But with that in mind we can see above that when going head-to-head against the runner-up, it has failed to prevail half of the time.

With that in mind, I would love to see an evolved process where we really take the time to examine these other categories available to us and look outside of 1) did they put up monster numbers, and 2) was their team good or at least make the playoffs? Those are obviously important, but in the tight races that we typically see, let’s campaign for these other metrics and use them to paint a picture that makes the most sense for what we truly consider our most valuable player. And don’t get it twisted - I left that open-ended for a reason. The beauty of how complicated this league is is showcased in this feature as we have so much data to pull from or pull ourselves, and that means it is exactly what you make it. I don’t want to tell you how to vote, I just want to show you how we have voted, give my analysis and leave the rest up to you to write the story you want to write.

According to our historical data, here are the minimum values to consider when selecting future winners for the Joe Montana MVP Award.

Let’s see our voting priorities all in one place.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see when I compiled these numbers, but I can say I’m a little surprised to see no throughlines across the board. Let’s go one by one and compare these findings with perception.

Sleeper

We want our Sleeper to be a diamond in the rough that emerges as a league winner at some point during the year. With that in mind, valuing their individual performance as the top priority feels right. But should we consider giving a little more attention to the team stats than what the data presents? I would say no for the most part. A true sleeper is an asset to any team, good or bad, which makes it difficult to evaluate their team contributions more than their personal accomplishments. I like how we have viewed this one historically and see categories like team win percentage and team total points rank as more of a tiebreaking measure rather than a case to build a campaign around. With all of that being said, I feel I will always value start percentage more than our league does overall. If I could change anything I would want our 33% success rate for that metric to increase. Talk is cheap, and trusting these guys week in and week out shows their value along with the numbers they bring.

Rookie

These numbers are just so interesting, and I for one love it. Like I said before, valuing start percentage is such an asset I am grateful we have used it as a tiebreaker historically. Outside of that, the comparison with the runner ups shows we really value positional rank when making our decisions. At the end of the day, did these rooks show out against not only the other rookies but the rest of the players at their position? The numbers show that the winner of this award has never finished worse than 13th positionally, so don’t expect to be in the running if your guy is making waves against the big boys.

MVP

This one is going to naturally be the most straight forward in terms of tracking data because it has the least volatility over our history. In the strong majority of races, we have the top QB pinned against the top RB and the outlier criteria helps us battle it out. We know for a fact they are going to be putting up huge numbers on good teams, so let’s really lean into the peripheral categories to act as true tiebreakers and sway the narrative.

As a league, the primary outlier category shifting the conversation for MVP has been… team win percentage! How does that hit you? Do you agree that if individual player statistics align that team success should be next direction our eyes turn? Like we discussed before, only JT has won the award with a worse team win percentage and it was neck and neck. We lean heavily on this factor here, far more than the other two awards, and I think for good reason as it can really shake up the campaign trail in December. MVP has and should be the most polarizing award to hand a vote to, and these outlier factors can typically tell a compelling story if you’re a good enough writer.

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I came into this not knowing what I would find but knowing for certain I still had lingering frustrations over the highest scoring player in our history losing the award last year. I wanted the data to help paint the picture I had in my head. That Lamar got robbed. That my frustration at Caden for not campaigning for him was justified. But ultimately, seeing what we value and the choices we have made has shown me that I might be the one that had a skewed perception. I tend to have a wider lens when evaluating the candidates and how it affects our league history rather than honing in on the simplicity of the honor and that it truly is an annual award. It really is just who was the most valuable player for that season, and while seeing the scenario where Lamar wins with the most points scored in FCS history is incredibly sound on paper, you can easily argue that that removes the spirit of the award. He can be deserving but also not be the best choice. I think this has helped me see the value of what we value.

With that being said, don’t be like Caden, and don’t be like me gaining perspective. Continue to shamefully go to bat for your players and campaign as hard as you can. Defy logic and bash your competitors as you try to wordsmith your way into more trophies. None of this article matters because you have the power to sway the results with your compelling narratives, and ultimately I hope that is your takeaway as a voter and as a campaigner. Look deeper, run these numbers, and find new data to make a more compelling case for why you should win. I believe in your ability to gaslight and manipulate accordingly, so you’re welcome for the gasoline.