7DnBrnc53 wrote: ↑Wed May 06, 2026 4:26 am
In his old NFL Vault series, Elliott Harrison said he would have split the award between Randall Cunningham and Derrick Thomas.
Yes, I agree with you. 1989 is another year that I wouldn't give it to Montana. I would have given it to Sterling Sharpe and Don Majkowski.
Another contoversial year is 1987. Rice and Montana had better numbers, but Elway was the whole team, and he deserved the MVP. Denver doesn't sniff the big game without him.
I’m not sure I wouldn’t have picked Montana in 1989.
If you are a quarterback with a great supporting cast around you then I want to see historically good stats for the time we are talking about, and 1989 Joe Cool did live up to that.
The Packers are most definitely a worse supporting cast than the Niners in 1989, and if you want to say Majik Man was more important to Green Bay individually then I could see that line of logic too; Green Bay also handed San Francisco one of its few losses in 1989.
Even if you would take Majkowski over Montana, I wouldn’t argue that that year is nearly the same degree of robbery as 1990 could be.
In 1987, Rice and Montana both played excellent, but I could see why they would have been viewed as canceling each other out for a lot of voters because one throws the passes and the other catches them; part of why basically no receiver has a shot of getting an MVP if the quarterback is healthy the entire season.
John Elway isn’t a bad pick given he didn’t have much of note to accompany him on offense at least.
Also, I’ve heard some people say that Rice’s touchdowns and Reggie White’s sack numbers in 1987 illustrate that the league was in a weird spot and were a product of teams being out of sync after the strike.
That’s also part of why to me at least, Jerry Rice has a better MVP case in 1995 than he did in 1987.
I should clarify that I would vote for Brett Favre at the end of the day, but hear me out:
That year he set a new single season receiving yardage record in a year that there was no strike, was the focal point of a number one offense that was lacking in the run game, and while 11-5, the 49ers were potentially a few plays away from getting a top seed. (if Young completes one more pass in that Falcons game then they might be in field goal range)
Most critically for an MVP candidacy by a receiver, Rice did this with Elvis Grbac starting five games instead of Steve Young. Grbac may have played decently for a backup quarterback, but he was still Young’s backup, and as I’ve argued before, if Young is healthy the whole year they probably do get the top seed, but Rice wouldn’t have nearly as strong an MVP case.