Named in honor of Automatic Otto Graham, the Automatic Award goes to the most valuable player in the league each season. Given the value of passing for most of NFL (and AFL and AAFC) history, this award will almost always go to a quarterback. He touches the live ball more than any other player, has by far the largest impact on the outcome of his team’s success, and is arguably the most important position in team sports. ^[1]I don’t know much about other sports, but I have been told goalies play a pretty outsized role in winning hockey games. In basketball, I don’t know if there is necessarily a single … Continue reading By and large, I am going to give preference to players on successful teams, with the possibly flawed idea that a player may have been valuable on a bad team, but it’s hard to call him most valuable if he had a losing squad. I try my best to separate a player’s contributions from those of his teammates, but I still attempt to recognize historically dominant seasons that come on teams with other great players. After all, it is difficult to disentangle a quarterback from his receivers and protectors, a running back from his blockers, or any player from his coaches, and I don’t want to take away too much credit from a guy just because of his perceived advantages.

I have chosen most valuable players for every season back to 1920. However, given the paucity of recorded stats, as well as the nigh nonexistence of film to study, I decided to publish only the results dating back to 1946. At that point, we have nearly the same box score numbers that we have today, and there is enough game footage available to paint a fairly reliable picture of a player’s performance. Obviously, with less information the further back we go, I have less confidence in my selections with each additional year we travel into the past. At the same time, because I know it is more difficult to come to conclusions about those seasons, I’m less torn up about picking players in a tossup scenario. Today, with abundant information at my fingertips, I find myself going back and forth over two or three players almost every year, talking myself in and out of their respective qualifications to the point that words start to lose meaning and I shrink into myself like Demeter of myth.
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