Welcome to the Athletic Football Show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Great show for you guys today.

Me and Derek Classen handed out some end-of-season awards.

Really enjoyed every aspect of this discussion.

We hit the big ones.

The MVP discussion is going to be coming last.

We spent a lot of time on that, a lot of care put into that because I think it's a tough one. You could go either way with Lamar Jackson or Josh Allen, and we talked about the cases for both guys at length, but also discussed some of the biggest surprises from this year, defensive player of the year and how that's an interesting argument, offensive rookie of the year, and how that's a pretty tight race, the coach of the year race this year and just all the different cases you can make for the guys there.

So really enjoy digging into all of those arguments with Derek.

Let's get to it.

All right, Derek, here we go.

End of season awards.

Doing this after week 17, which isn't ideal, but I think there are enough guys.

Like, Josh Allen's going to play a half or a quarter just to keep his consecutive game streak alive.

For all intents and purposes, the season is over for a good majority of the teams in the NFL.

So the fact that it landed that way makes me feel a little bit more comfortable about doing this with one week left. There was part of me that was like, I can't believe we're going to do this one. Some of these are really close and you can make any argument you want. We're going to do with one game left on the schedule. But for the most part, because people are

sitting, because everything, not everything, but most of the playoffs are sewn up, I feel okay

doing this a week earlier than we actually should. Absolutely. Like some of these races are close,

so it feels like you would want to push it to the end of the season. But almost none of the

games should have any bearing on that race.

So it really doesn't matter if we're doing it a week beforehand.

Yeah, and this is just the nature of the schedule.

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