NFL network and espn seem to be on a mission to promote Rivers case, article after article of Rivers merits are starting to surface the interwebs ,they are portraying this race to be a lot closer than it really should be and while they do say Peyton is the front runner ,they make no articles or try to show why he is the front runner ,they limit themselves to just mention it.

As soon as the Saints lost, the Path to Perfection is barely mention anymore, they lost their hit storyline and now are trying to make one new out of the MVP race.

This last 2 games if Peyton has a slow start and gets pulled out early and Rivers has a great game against a porous secondary , i promised myself not to watch NFL net or Espn for the week. The Peyton haters will get out of every corner of the MSM to try to make a final push against him.

The benchmark for MVP is “If you remove a player from the lineup of their respective team, and replace him with an average player at the same position, what is the overall drop off in performance?”

If you remove Rivers from the Chargers, I’d say they drop two, maybe three games. They’d still be in Wild Card contention.

If you remove Manning from the Colts, they drop seven games. They’d go from the #1 overall seed to out of the playoffs.

That’s the measure of an MVP. All this talk about Rivers is hype. It’s ESPN and SI and everyone else trying to drum up excitement over nothing. They basically want people to act surprised.

The biggest thing in Manning’s way is Manning Fatigue. He wins so much, so often, and so well, that it’s a cliche to give him the MVP. It’s the AP voters going “We gave him 3 of these things. Sure, he deserves a 4th, and he’ll get it, but do we really need to give it to him again, a year after his last one?”

Of course, we now have to consider the possibility of Manning ending the question of Greatest Player Ever, this season. Hypothetical situation: Peyton Manning wins his record-breaking 4th NFL MVP. His team goes 16-0. They go to the Super Bowl. The Colts win, going 19-0 and posting the first Perfect Season since the 1972 Dolphins. Peyton Manning is the Super Bowl MVP. So, Peyton is the QB of the Greatest Team Ever, in a season in which he won the Regular Season MVP and Post Season MVP, and went undefeated. If he does it, and retires tomorrow, I think he ends the discussion of Greatest Player Ever, right there. He would literally have achieved everything. Anything left would be icing. Short of going 19-0 again, he’d have nothing left to prove.

Interesting thought, right?

First, Peyton is the MVP by a landslide. With that out of the way, I don’t have a problem with people discussing the merits of other candidates. Up until last week I would have considered Drew Brees a viable MVP option. I take issue with suggesting that Rivers is all of a sudden the #2 contender. He is a good QB no doubt, but his play barely warrants a mention in the MVP decision. He is only 6th in passing yards, 7th in completion percentage, and 6th in TDs. He is clearly behind both Manning and Brees (who have better records also) and probably behind Favre and possibly behind Rodgers as well. And those are just the QBs. Is the MVP race all about stats? No. But they do play a part… especially when they point to a guy not even being in the top 5 at his position.

4 MVPs and 2 Lombardis by the end of the season! And the best commercials ever!