Josh Allen Over Lamar Jackson? The Impact of Big Game Performances on the 2024 NFL MVP Award

The NFL schedule in Week 11 had several big games for playoff seeding that could go a long way in determining division winners, the Super Bowl champion, and even the MVP award winner in the 2024 season. Not surprisingly, these big game performances shifted the MVP odds with Josh Allen regaining the lead over Lamar Jackson. A bad game for Lamar in Pittsburgh combined with a victorious moment for Allen to end the Chiefs’ winning streak has Allen (+125 at FanDuel) as the new odds-on favorite for MVP.

We said two weeks ago that those Week 11 games would be significant for the MVP award, but can Allen really sustain this momentum past his bye week while Jackson gets a chance to bounce back on Monday night against the Chargers’ top-ranked defense? If Jackson shreds the Chargers in a win, does he regain the lead? It’s not like Allen can lose to his bye week. Only Daniel Jones does that.

This MVP race looks like it is going to flip a lot of people’s arguments from a year ago on their head. That was when Jackson and Allen were the last two candidates standing, but we shouldn’t be treating 2024 as a two-horse race yet as Detroit quarterback Jared Goff is third in the MVP odds (+800 at FanDuel) and his Lions have the best record and No. 1 scoring offense, two common MVP benchmarks.

This is also such a week-to-week league anymore as you saw it with Goff going from a five-interception game in Houston – a game Detroit still won with 26 points – to leading seven straight touchdown drives for historic offensive perfection against Jacksonville.

But notice that shredding the Jaguars for over 400 passing yards and a perfect passer rating on Sunday afternoon didn’t make Goff the MVP frontrunner. People were too busy watching more important games like Jackson struggling in Pittsburgh, or later when Allen took down the Chiefs and their 15-game winning streak. Those games are on a different scale than scoring 52 points against a team rumored to fire its head coach any day now, right?

That brings us to the point of our study today.

We know MVP awards are dominated by quarterbacks with great stats on great teams that win a lot of games. But do you need to have great stats in wins against great teams too, or can you still win MVP by squashing the scrubs and playing small in the big games?

This usually isn’t how the MVP debate goes, but this is what happens when you don’t have a season with a conventional candidate leading the way. That means someone who is statistically great (volume and efficiency) on a team that’s winning a high rate of its games. We had three of them in 2020 with Aaron Rodgers edging out Patrick Mahomes and Allen for the award. But in recent years, only Mahomes on the 2022 Chiefs was a conventional pick as he led the team to the best record (14-3) with the best statistics and leading the No. 1 offense.

But that’s not where the NFL is with defenses getting the best of offenses on a more routine basis, young quarterbacks struggling to develop, and some veterans not playing their best ball.

That’s why we decided to look at all 30 quarterback seasons to win MVP dating back to Boomer Esiason on the 1988 Bengals to try to get some sense of what might matter down the stretch of this 2024 season. We’ll circle back at the end to this year’s MVP candidates and their big-game resumes in 2024.