NFL

Finding Betting Value in the Odds for the 2018 NFL MVP Award

Neil Dutton  —  @ndutton13 May 22nd, 2018
Aaron Rodgers had his 2017 campaign cut short by injury, but he'll likely be in the MVP conversation if he can stay healthy in 2018. Which other players make for good bets?

The advent of sports betting in the US means the opening of many of the potential betting markets enjoyed by those of us from the "other" side of the water. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am from England.) Forget just betting on the spread or the over/under, soon you'll be able to bet on all manner of events happening within a game. From next touchdown scorer, to method of next points scored -- the possibilities are endless.

With all this to look forward to, let's take a look at a fun futures bet -- the 2018 NFL MVP, using numbers from oddsshark.com.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 20 players with the best odds for this award are all quarterbacks. Yep, 20.

This shouldn't be a shock when you consider that quarterbacks have taken home the award 42 times since 1957. Even in 1997, when Barry Sanders won the award, he had to share it with Brett Favre. Signal-callers have won 10 of the last 11 MVP awards, with Adrian Peterson being the lone exception back in 2012.

Let's take a look at five players -- all quarterbacks -- and break down their odds of winning the 2018 NFL MVP.

Throughout this piece, we'll reference our in-house Net Expected Points (NEP) metric, which tracks the efficiency of both teams and players, with the team side being adjusted for strength of opponent. A three-yard reception on 3rd-and-2 is wildly different than a three-yard reception on 3rd-and-4, and NEP helps account for that by tracking the expected points players add to their teams' total over the course of a season. You can learn more about NEP in our glossary.

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