Most valuable player
Only five other players have won more than two NFL MVP awards: Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas, Brett Favre, Tom Brady, and Aaron Rodgers.
For instance, in professional basketball, Kareem-Abdul Jabbar won the 1975–76 MVP award even though his team did not qualify for the postseason.
Additionally, several other NBA players in history have been awarded MVP, and proceeded to lose in the first round of the postseason.
[7] Similar to Jerry West in basketball, Chuck Howley in football won the 1971 Super Bowl Most Valuable Player Award despite having lost the Super Bowl V.[8] In 1960, Bobby Richardson won the World Series MVP Award, but lost the World Series.
[9] In ice hockey, three players, Al Rollins in 1954, Andy Bathgate in 1959 and Mario Lemieux in 1988 each won the NHL's oldest MVP award, the Hart Trophy, with Lemieux also receiving the Ted Lindsay Award (introduced in 1970–71 and voted on by the league's players), but did not make the playoffs.
[14] The first most valuable player award given in North American sports can be traced back to professional baseball in the early 1900s.
A group of sportswriters met after the 1911 baseball season to determine the "most important and useful players to the club and to the league".
In most professional sports leagues, the overall pool of players is initially narrowed down to a list of nominees, called finalists, forming a group from which the individual winner is decided based on regular season performance.
Some prominent examples of sports that conduct MVP awards are baseball, basketball, football, ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer, handball and rugby.
[17] The BBWAA does not offer a clear-cut definition of what "most valuable" means, instead leaving the judgment to the individual voters.
Since the start of the 1980 NBA season, a panel of broadcasters and sportswriters are brought together to vote on the MVP award.
In the NFL, the MVP award is voted upon by a panel of 50 sportswriters at the end of the regular season, before the playoffs, though the results are not announced to the public until the day before the Super Bowl.
[22] In the NHL, the MVP award voting is conducted at the end of the regular season by members of the Professional Hockey Writers' Association, and each individual voter ranks their top five candidates on a 10–7–5–3–1 point(s) system.
Philosophers Stephen Kershnar and Neil Feit argue that the concept of the MVP is a fundamentally vague concept, but still valuable in that it promotes the active discussion of different types of excellence found within a specific sport and the weight to be assigned these types, thus leading to a gain for the discussants.
