NFL MVP Betting: Can Justin Jefferson Defy the Odds at His Position?

Did you know that more placekickers have won the AP NFL MVP award than wide receivers?

That’s mostly because a wide receiver has never won the award, but Mark Moseley took home the award in 1982 as the kicker in Washington.

Cooper Kupp’s record-setting season in 2021 garnered him just a single vote for the MVP award that season. Michael Thomas’ record-setting 2019 season wasn’t good enough to garner any votes, but his incredible 2018 campaign did help earn quarterback Drew Brees several votes for the award. Not even Calvin Johnson’s 2012 season – in which he recorded the most receiving yards in NFL history (1,964) – could garner a single MVP vote.

This year, Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Justin Jefferson has the best odds of any non-quarterback to win the MVP award on the FanDuel Sportsbook’s NFL season-long awards betting market.

The “non-quarterback” part of that sentence is likely the most important. Just four non-quarterback players have won the award since 2000, and each of those was a running back: Adrian Peterson in 2012, LaDanian Tomlinson in 2006, Shaun Alexander in 2005, and Marshall Faulk in 2000.

The NFL AP MVP award has pretty much been the “Most Valuable Quarterback” award for most of its history, while the AP’s Offensive Player of the Year award – which Jefferson won in 2022 – has acted as the de facto MVP award for non-quarterbacks.

So what does a wideout have to do to get some respect in the MVP conversation?

For starters, it couldn’t hurt to break Calvin Johnson’s record. Justin Jefferson has a chance to do just that in 2023.

Jefferson’s Resume

Jefferson has simply been different since he stepped onto the NFL field.

He hit the ground running in his rookie season, posting 88 catches for 1400 yards and 7 scores. He improved on those marks in his second season by catching 108 passes for 1,616 yards and 10 more scores. Most recently, he finished the 2022 season with an absurd 1,809 yards and 8 touchdowns on 128 receptions.

Jefferson will be just 24 years old when the 2023 season begins and has somehow managed to improve in each of his first 3 campaigns. He has been on an elite trajectory, one even his former teammate Ja'Marr Chase – who was the more highly touted prospect heading into the NFL – has struggled to keep up with. No player in league history has recorded more receiving yards or receptions in their first 3 seasons than Jefferson’s 324 catches and 4,825 receiving yards.

Generally speaking, it’s hard to envision any player improving on a 1,800-yard season – a landmark only 5 players had reached before Jefferson’s 2022 season – but it feels unwise to count Jefferson out based on his track record.

An MVP Receiver Season

As we mentioned earlier, an MVP receiver season probably has to start with that receiver breaking Calvin Johnson’s record for receiving yards in a season. Johnson finished the 2012 campaign with 1,964 yards in 16 games.

The NFL has since added a 17th game to their seasonal schedule. To silence any potential critics, that means a wideout would need to either break Johnson’s record by Week 16 of the season and/or finish with more yards than Johnson would have recorded if he had played a 17th game at his 122.8-yards-per-game pace. In either case, a receiver would pretty much have to break 2,000 receiving yards to be the undoubted record holder.

That insane landmark seems oddly within reach for Jefferson. A 2,000-yard season means he’d need to average at least 118 yards per game in a 17-game season. That would be an extra 11.6 yards per game over Jefferson’s league-leading 106.4 yards per game in 2022.

The Minnesota Vikings threw for 4,484 yards in the 2022 season – the fifth-most in the league – of which Jefferson accounted for just over 40%. But there’s actually room for growth there. Throughout the history of the NFL, there have been 15 seasons in which a quarterback threw for more than 5,000 yards. 12 of those seasons occurred before the NFL expanded its schedule to 17 games.

Quarterback Kirk Cousins has been knocking on the door of a 5,000-yard season for several years, even reaching 4,917 passing yards in 16 games in 2016. The expanded 17-game season makes it easier than ever before for a passer to reach that mark. Having Cousins throw for an extra 500 or so yards would be a massive boost to Jefferson’s chances of breaking Calvin Johnson’s record.

Minnesota's Team Context

“Easier than ever before” doesn’t mean it will actually be easy, though – it’s still a pretty rare feat, and one that only Patrick Mahomes accomplished in 2022. But the Vikings could be set up to meet that challenge in 2023.

Teams don’t exactly just throw for 5,000 yards unprompted. High passing volume is often precipitated by a struggling defense.

The Vikings' defense certainly struggled in 2022, something that went slightly overlooked based on their NFC North-winning 13-4 record. Despite that impressive record the team still allowed 3 more points to their opponents than they scored themselves during the season. If not for a league-leading 8 fourth-quarter comebacks – 3 more than the second-place Colts’ 5 such comebacks – the Vikings’ season would have looked a lot different.

That struggling defense allowed the third-most points (427) in the league in 2022, and it doesn’t look like things are going to get significantly better in 2023. They moved on from stalwarts like Dalvin Tomlinson, Eric Kendricks, and Patrick Peterson, necessitating the signings of several free agents to cheaper contracts as the team works to improve their salary cap situation. ProFootballNetwork’s Arif Hasan – a former Vikings reporter – ranked the Vikings’ defense 27th-best for the upcoming season in a recent article, insinuating that while the defense did get younger, they may not have gotten substantially better.

Their surprise first-place finish in the NFC North last season will also have repercussions in 2023. That division win means that they’ll face tougher competition in their 2023 schedule, including teams with high-scoring offenses like the Philadelphia Eagles, the Cincinnati Bengals, and the San Francisco 49ers. They’re also paired with the AFC West for their out-of-conference games, meaning they’ll square up against some of the best offenses in the league with the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers -- as well as Sean Payton's Denver Broncos and the Las Vegas Raiders.

The combination of a poor defense, an intimidating slate of opposing offenses, and a quarterback capable of reaching 5,000 passing yards does set Jefferson up quite nicely for another high-impact season in 2023.

MVP Award History

Reading between the lines of the history of the AP NFL MVP award, there’s at least one obvious reason why so few receivers have ever received recognition as genuine candidates for the award. It stands to reason that if a wide receiver is having an outstanding season, then their quarterback is likely having a “more valuable” one.

We even leaned into this part of the narrative in the previous section, stating that Kirk Cousins would need to have a rare, 5,000-yard season as a passer to help Jefferson eclipse 2,000 receiving yards. A receiver’s production can basically never truly be independent of their quarterback. For a receiver to generate MVP buzz, they would essentially need to be thriving in spite of their quarterback’s play, not because of it.

This also seems possible with Cousins at the helm for the Vikings. For as much success as Cousins has had as a volume passer in the league, he has never truly been considered one of the league’s elite passers. His teams have usually finished at or around a .500 record, and prior to last season, he was regarded as one of the least “clutch” quarterbacks in the league. Warranted or not, he had a reputation for crumbling under pressure or in the spotlight and he had never put together more than 4 game-winning drives in a season prior to last year (8).

We can draw a loose parallel between the NFL’s MVP award and the Heisman Trophy award in college football. Receivers have traditionally had an extremely difficult time winning the Heisman Trophy. It took DeVonta Smith’s insane 2020 season with Alabama to snap the near-20-year drought of receivers winning the award.

In his award-winning season, Smith caught 117 passes for 1,856 yards and 23 touchdowns. He led college football in every receiving metric, and more than doubled the receptions, yards, and touchdowns of any of the receivers on his own team. His superstar-level production led to quarterback Mac Jones finishing with an extremely impressive season in his own right – Jones threw 41 touchdowns to just 4 interceptions while the Crimson Tide went undefeated.

Smith’s absurd season did result in him (rightfully) winning the Heisman, but it still carried Jones to a third-place finish in the voting.

Smith’s path to the Heisman illustrates just how difficult it is for receivers to gain recognition for these types of awards. No matter how good they look, their impressive plays still count toward their quarterback’s stats at the end of the season.

That’s why having a quarterback like Kirk Cousins might work in Jefferson’s favor; Cousins is already capable of putting up massive numbers in the passing game without garnering MVP-level respect, and that’s with Jefferson putting up record-setting numbers while playing with Cousins.

Another Weird, Winning Season

We’ve already covered that Jefferson could benefit from the Vikings’ defense struggling again in 2023 and noted that the 13-4 2022 Vikings were a unique outlier given their negative point differential. A bad defense leading to a high-volume passing offense isn’t likely to generate another massively-winning season for Minnesota.

But that kind of needs to happen again in 2023 for Jefferson to take home the MVP award. Past MVP winners in recent history have almost all led their teams to division titles while winning 11 or more games.

Adrian Peterson’s own Minnesota Vikings team in 2012 is a bit of an exception. The VIkings finished in second place in the NFC North that year with a 10-6 record. But in that season, Peterson rushed for over 2,000 yards while scoring almost as many touchdowns on the ground (12) as starting quarterback Christian Ponder threw (18). Peterson also had the impressive narrative bonus in that he had just suffered a torn ACL at the end of the previous season, which had put his career in doubt before the beginning of the season.

Jefferson is healthy this year and needs his quarterback to provide at least a baseline level of competence, so we can pretty much ignore Peterson’s MVP-winning season. So what we need is for the Vikings to win the NFC North again – with at least 11 or 12 wins – while Jefferson looks like the primary reason for their success.

That is going to be difficult to accomplish. The NFL division odds market gives the Vikings +270 odds to take down the NFC North, trailing the Detroit Lions at +145. Making things even more difficult, the Green Bay Packers aren’t far behind with +350 odds, and the Chicago Bears remain in the conversation with +420 odds. No division in the league has tighter odds than the NFC North this season on the FanDuel Sportsbook.

Winning that division will be tricky, but playing in the NFC North does have one advantage for Jefferson – no division in the league played worse defense than the NFC North in 2022. The Bears, Vikings, and Lions allowed the most, third-most, and fourth-most points, respectively, of any NFL teams last season, and the Packers finished around league average in that regard. That means the Vikings should at least get 4-6 matchups in division against weaker defenses, which should allow Jefferson to put up big receiving numbers in those games.

Can He Actually Do It?

So let’s recap all that would need to happen for Justin Jefferson to have a shot at winning the MVP award in 2023.

Jefferson would need to break Calvin Johnson’s record for most receiving yards in a season and likely would need to finish with more than 2,000 receiving yards.

Jefferson would probably need his quarterback to throw for at least 5,000 passing yards without outshining him.

He’ll need his defense to perform as poorly or worse than it did in the previous season -- but not so badly that the team loses too many games.

And, finally, he probably needs the Vikings to win the NFC North -- and for the credit of their victory to fall into his lap.

Jefferson is truly a longshot to win the MVP award this season, and his +10000 odds reflect just how long of a shot he is. But the young receiver is on a Hall-of-Fame trajectory entering his fourth season and has been blasting through records at an electrifying pace since joining the NFL’s ranks. If a receiver is ever going to win an MVP award, Jefferson might truly be set up to be that guy in 2023.

The above author is a FanDuel employee and is not eligible to compete in public daily fantasy contests or place sports betting wagers on FanDuel. The advice provided by the author does not necessarily represent the views of FanDuel. Taking the author’s advice will not guarantee a successful outcome. You should use your own judgment when participating in daily fantasy contests or placing sports wagers.