For most of the past decade I have priced MVP futures by leaning on a single uncomfortable truth that the betting public has been slow to absorb: the award has been won by a quarterback in 13 consecutive seasons, and in 23 of the last 26. What has changed in the second half of that run is which kind of quarterback the voters reward. When I started in this business, the prototype MVP was a pocket passer with elite passing numbers. By the late 2010s, the prototype had quietly become a dual-threat quarterback whose rushing production was the difference between “very good season” and “MVP narrative”. UK punters who still price the MVP board as if it were 2008 are missing where the value lives.

Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes have all earned MVP votes — and in Jackson’s case, two awards — while putting up rushing yardage that would have been unimaginable for an MVP quarterback in the 1990s. This piece is about reading that shift and how it affects the way UK punters should approach the MVP futures market.

Rushing yards and MVP correlations since 2018

Run the numbers since 2018, when the dual-threat shift accelerated, and the correlations are striking. Eight of the last 12 MVP runners-up have been quarterbacks with at least 300 rushing yards. Six of the last 12 winners have been quarterbacks with at least 400 rushing yards. The single year a non-rushing quarterback won was Mahomes in 2022, but Hurts finished second that year with rushing numbers that would have led the league a decade earlier.

The clean takeaway is that rushing yards by a quarterback function as an MVP multiplier on top of passing production, not as a substitute for it. A quarterback who throws for 3,800 yards and rushes for 900 will outpace a quarterback who throws for 4,500 yards and rushes for 100 in MVP voting, because the dual-threat profile maps onto the modern voter’s instinct for offensive innovation. The combined yardage matters more than the passing yardage in isolation.

The rushing-touchdown number matters even more than the rushing-yardage number. Hurts’s 13 rushing touchdowns in 2022 were as much a part of his MVP near-miss as his passing production was. Voters react to red-zone running quarterbacks viscerally — they see a 5-yard quarterback keeper into the end zone and remember the play, while a 5-yard passing touchdown is more easily forgotten. The trader implication is that a quarterback whose rushing production is concentrated in goal-line situations carries a narrative weight that exceeds his raw yardage contribution.

The injury discount applied to mobile quarterbacks in futures pricing

If dual-threat quarterbacks have a clear MVP probability premium, why are some of them still priced longer than the data suggests they should be? The answer is the injury discount. UK bookmakers price mobile quarterbacks with a built-in adjustment for the higher hit count they take and the higher historical rate of missed games among rushing quarterbacks.

The discount is real and partially justified. Quarterbacks who run for more than 500 yards in a season miss an average of two more games over a three-year window than quarterbacks who run for fewer than 100. That extra missed game is enough to derail an MVP campaign in a season-long market where the 11-win team rule effectively requires the quarterback to play at least 15 games. A quarterback who suffers a four-week absence is mathematically eliminated from MVP contention even if he plays at an elite level when healthy, because the 11-win threshold becomes too steep to clear without him.

The trader question is whether the discount is set correctly. My read of the historic data is that the discount is roughly right for established rushing quarterbacks who have a multi-year injury history, but is too steep for younger rushing quarterbacks who have not yet accumulated meaningful injury history. The Hurts who emerged in 2022 was priced with a Hurts-the-veteran injury discount before he had earned it; by 2023 the market had corrected, but the 2022 preseason price contained genuine value for that reason.

How UK punters can position on dual-threat MVP candidates

Three positions have worked consistently for me on dual-threat MVP markets. The first is the preseason longshot on the second-year dual-threat quarterback who put up notable rushing numbers as a rookie. These players are typically priced in the 25-to-1 to 50-to-1 range as sophomores, and the market under-prices their MVP probability because it weights rookie-year passing inefficiencies too heavily.

The second is the November position on the established dual-threat quarterback whose team is winning. If a Jackson or Hurts is leading a 7-2 team in early November with combined rushing-passing production tracking toward MVP levels, their price has typically not yet caught up to the favourite tier. There is a window in early to mid-November when these candidates trade at meaningful longer odds than they will trade at by December.

The third is the contrarian position against a dual-threat candidate whose injury history is being underweighted. This is rare and uncomfortable to stake, but in seasons where a dual-threat MVP favourite has already missed games and is being priced as a presumptive winner, the second-favourite traditional passer often has significantly more value than the headline odds suggest. The longshot end of the board is where the structural dynamics behind the QB-dominance trend get even more interesting; the related piece on NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year futures picks up the question of how rookie quarterbacks transition into MVP-tier pricing within a couple of seasons.

A modern lens on a 70-year-old award

The NFL MVP has been awarded since 1957, and for most of that history it has been a passing-quarterback award with brief interruptions for transcendent running backs and one quarterback-as-rusher anomaly. The shift over the last seven seasons toward systematically rewarding dual-threat quarterbacks is a real evolution in how the voter pool thinks, and UK punters who price the futures market with the old prototype in mind will miss the value that has clustered around the new one. Read the rushing numbers as MVP multipliers. Respect the injury discount but check whether it is calibrated correctly for the specific candidate. And remember that a 5-yard quarterback touchdown counts twice in a voter’s memory — once on the stat sheet and once in the story they tell their colleagues in January.

Do MVP voters reward QB rushing touchdowns differently from passing touchdowns?
Yes, and the evidence is consistent across the dual-threat era. Voters appear to weight rushing touchdowns by quarterbacks more heavily per unit than passing touchdowns, partly because rushing scores are more visually memorable and partly because they cluster in the red zone where game-winning moments tend to happen. Hurts in 2022 and Allen across multiple seasons benefited from rushing-touchdown production that helped them outpoll quarterbacks whose passing-touchdown numbers were higher. The structural lesson for UK punters is to track rushing-touchdown totals as a separate MVP-relevant statistic, not just as a footnote to total touchdown counts.
Has any QB won MVP without finishing top-10 in passing yards?
Yes, and the examples are concentrated in the dual-threat era. Lamar Jackson"s 2019 unanimous MVP came with passing yardage well outside the top 10 — his passing production was efficient rather than voluminous, and his rushing contribution closed the gap. The voter pool has been increasingly willing to reward total offensive production rather than raw passing yardage, which means UK punters should be wary of treating top-10 passing yards as a necessary MVP filter. The candidate to back is the one with the combined-yardage and combined-touchdown profile, not the one with the cleanest pure-passing line.