Don't Call it a Comeback (Unless it Meets These Guidelines)

The Comeback Player of the Year race is no longer about "who inspired us" but "who meets the new vague, arbitrary criteria."

Comebacks are like pornography. We know them when we see them. And they’re awesome.

For a long time, legal experts punted on the precise definition of pornography, finally settling upon whatever prompts you to open an incognito browser window in 2017. The NFL, however, has decided to try to define the “comeback,” at least as it pertains to the Comeback Player of the Year award.

Here are the new guidelines for the award, brought to you by the folks who turned the concept of a “catch” from something a toddler with a beach ball instinctively understands into an metaphysical abstraction with more caveats and codicils than the standard mortgage: 

The spirit of the AP Comeback Player of the Year Award is to honor a player who has demonstrated resilience in the face of adversity by overcoming illness, physical injury or other circumstances that led him to miss playing time the previous season.

To be clear, the Associated Press created the new criteria, not the NFL, but of course the AP would not issue such an edict about an officially sanctioned award without the blessing/orders of the league. 

The NFL was obviously a little miffed that Damar Hamlin did not clinch the 2023 Comeback Player of the Year award the moment he walked onto the field last year. The issue, of course, is that walking onto the field is all that Hamlin really did: he played 155 uneventful snaps last season, playoffs included, most of them on special teams. Hamlin actually received 21 first-place votes for the award, more than any other candidate, but Joe Flacco earned 13 first place votes and many runner-up votes for returning from quasi-retirement and the bosom of his family to play an incredibly meaningful role in the playoff race. Baker Mayfield received 10 first place votes for coming back from being passed around the league like the broccoli casserole at Thanksgiving dinner.  

Damar Hamlin won the NFLPA Alan Page Community Award for 2023. Photo by me.

I would have cheered happily if Hamlin won CPOY last year, but I would have voted for Flacco if the AP would allow me, and would probably still vote for him under the new guidelines. I would also have voted for Geno Smith in 2022, even if the league hit me with some easily-reinterpreted legalese. “Age” and “the perception that you no longer have any value to society” sound like “other circumstances” that require “resilience in the face of adversity” to me, a marginally-employed sportswriter with a lingering backache. Having worked for some soul-crushingly incompetent bosses, I can also relate to the resilience Ryan Tannehill needed in 2019 to overcome his greatest source of adversity: Adam Gase.

When assigning an award for a “comeback,” I would rather focus on the achievement than the adversity. Focusing on the achievement allows us to celebrate Flacco’s/Geno’s touchdowns, playoff-relevant victories and late-career triumphs over the snickering narratives that haunted both of them. Focusing on the adversity forces us to ghoulishly rank traumatic events using TierMaker. Hamlin’s injury was severe and terrifying. But how does it compare to, say, Teddy Bridgewater’s training camp injury in 2016? What about Foster Moreau’s return from cancer last year, which earned him zero CPOY votes of any kind? What about a player’s return from a mental health crisis or substance issues? The AP/NFL cautiously lumped such matters under “other circumstances” to avoid accusations of insensitivity, but all that will do is potentially marginalize candidates whose adversity was more complex (and perhaps challenging) than an ACL tear.  

Furthermore, just how meager does a player’s on-field contribution have to be before I can ignore his backstory? Should voters scour the bottoms of depth charts for bit players who really faced adversity? What degree of suffering would push a minor player ahead of, say, Aaron Rodgers this year? A kidnapping by pirates? Falling down a mineshaft? Is there a hierarchy of injuries, based on the resilience needed for a comeback? You’ll forgive me if I wish to focus on quantifying the success, not the suffering. 

A thought experiment: What if Josh Gordon returns to the NFL and catches 75 passes this year? I would advocate hard for him to win Comeback Player of the Year. But I am almost certain the new guidelines would trip up many voters. 

Also, don’t think for a moment that NFL awards voters will ignore the letter of the new not-quite-law. These individuals (many of them dear friends) cling to the root word “value” in Most Valuable Player the way early Christian theologians clung to the word parthenos in the Septuegent. If Gordon managed some epic comeback and voters were forced to apply the current guidelines to it, their heads would explode. If Carson Wentz were to manage one, my head would explode.

Betting on a Comeback

Frankly, the only reason that there’s drama and intrigue around CPOY is because folks can legally wager on it. There weren’t many national debates about the award in, say, 2013, when Philip Rivers won for coming back from a somewhat disappointing year to have a somewhat more impressive one. I don’t think the down-ballot awards attracted many bettors back when you had to call a bookie and ask him the odds on Mac Jones winning CPOY (+12000) than they are now, when you can drop three bucks on him while waiting for a commuter train in June without anyone questioning your judgement/priorities/sanity. I don’t think the AP should be in the business of clarifying the parameters for prop bets, but here we are.

The candidate most likely to suffer from the new guidelines was a dark horse to begin with: Russell Wilson, currently getting +2500 schmuckbait odds for CPOY. Wilson’s “adversity” over the last two years boils down to the rich-and-famous-person equivalent of a toddler eating too much cake and ice cream at a birthday party. His most likely outcome for 2024 is a season that looks statistically similar to 2023 for a Steelers team that finishes somewhere between 8-7-2 and 7-6-4. He wasn’t going to win the award anyway, but the new criteria will essentially reduce his chances to zero.

Wilson isn’t the candidate the NFL/AP is worried about. That would be Deshaun Watson, who has better odds (a +2200 moneyline) than Wilson. Many voters might seek any excuse to avoid Watson, but life doesn’t always offer plausible alternatives to the unpleasant, and the tiered voting system could propel Watson to victory on second/third place votes.

The new AP/NFL guidelines don’t even disqualify Watson: if he comes back in 2024, it will be from last year’s injuries, not two seasons on the commissioner’s Hope This Problem Solves Itself List. So if a healthy Watson gets the Browns to the playoffs without doing anything reminiscent of a low-level villain in a Tokyo crime thriller, a few voters might choose him based on the purity of their interpretation of the “comeback” criteria. 

The new voting guidelines would have disqualified Michael Vick, who won CPOY in 2010, after he served 18 months at Leavenworth for his connection to a dogfighting ring. In hindsight, would disqualifying Vick feel right to you? It smacks of double jeopardy to me. Considering the severity of the Watson accusations and the relative lack of consequences he faced, denying Watson a trophy would be more like single jeopardy. But I don’t think we can balance the scales of justice using awards ballots.

Aaron Rodgers is getting +120 odds, and there is plenty of meat on that bone for wagerers. Contrary to what you might think, voters are unlikely to hold the fact that Rodgers is a platinum-plated douchewaffle against him; Watson’s situation is qualitatively different, of course. Rodgers won a landslide vote for MVP in 2021, when he made himself unavailable for a game (a Packers loss during the playoff chase) because he considered himself smarter than all of the planet’s epidemiologists at a time when some of us weren’t certain we could safely take our elderly parents to the neighborhood diner. Rodgers could still talk his way out of any award, but he’s set the bar for egomaniacal team sabotage so high that some criticism of the Jets, a little malicious slander of a celebrity or the usual sovereign citizen stupidity just won’t cut it. If Rodgers stays mostly healthy and leads the Jets to nine wins, he’ll be Comeback Player of the Year. I won’t complain about it, because I might just wager on it. 

Kirk Cousins is the masochist’s choice for CPOY at +500. The moneyline isn’t bad, and his path to the award will be pretty clear if Rodgers stumbles. But never, ever bet on the Falcons. And if you still expect Cousins to do anything but fall just short of expectations, no matter how meager those expectations may be, nothing I can write will help you.

The Falcons are currently -115 to win the NFC South and -240 to reach the playoffs. Avoid both of these wagers the way you would avoid a chemical spill on the turnpike. Conventional wisdom sees Cousins’ ordinariness stacking atop the Falcons ordinariness to create a sort of ordinary double-decker turkey club sandwich: dry and tasteless, but the most nourishing item on the NFC South menu. DVOA sees a mediocre team whose defense only looked decent last year because of the competition they faced, now featuring a 36-year old non-legend coming off a major injury at quarterback.

Cousins and the Falcons are destined to make each other more like themselves. If you like degenerate-worthy speculative NFC South bets, consider the Saints to make the playoffs +170: their schedule is a cakewalk, and they are more “old and expensive” than truly “bad.”

Wedged between Rodgers and Cousins on the CPOY shortlist is Joe Burrow, a bad bet at +250 because he will likely get hurt again. Seriously, the bar for Burrow feels higher than the other candidates: a playoff berth won’t move the needle the way it will for Rodgers or Cousins, and the Bengals will get less media attention for a successful season than the Jets. Also, Burrow already won CPOY in 2021. Voters may be reluctant to break the Pennington Seal by granting a second award, especially in the fifth year of a player’s career. 

(Another question prompted by the new criteria: doesn’t it take more resilience to come back multiple times? If my house got wrecked by a tornado, I’d find a way to rebuild. If a second tornado came around one year later, I’d leap into it in the weary hope of ending up Yellow Brick Roadkill.)

Anthony Richardson is getting +600 odds, Daniel Jones +2000. I believe that a “comeback” requires having gotten somewhere in the first place. Richardson could seize the CPOY award by having an All-Pro season but getting shut out of MVP and Offensive Player of the Year consideration by Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen et al. He’s more likely to be granted one of those sponsored “Air and Ground” awards no one wagers on or cares about.

As for Jones, I can envision a grungy comeback: Malik Nabers becomes instant Ja’Marr Chase, the defense records 55 sacks and the Giants hover around .500 on the strength of wins by final scores like 16-13. That wouldn’t net Jones CPOY, but it would trick John Mara into ordering another extension. Trust me: job security >>>>>>> accolades.

Nick Chubb (+1200) posted inspirational videos about his ACL rehab on social media a few weeks ago week, which is a discouraging sign. Injured players who are ready to report to training camp in early summer do things like, I dunno, report to training camp in mid-summer. Players whose knees are still held together by baling wire post videos that look like outtakes from Zach Snyder’s Justice League or performing drills that look like mocap sessions for a live-action Watership Down adaptation. Running backs make bad comeback bets anyway, because running backs rarely really come back.

Valedictorians and Good Citizens

Returning to the new guidelines: I wish the guidelines explicitly stated “demonstrates on-field excellence as well as resilience . . .” That might disqualify Hamlin and Moreau, but it would instruct voters to funnel the award’s built-in human-interest element through on-field accomplishments, not the other way around.

The current state of the AP awards voting process reminds me of the high school awards committees I used to sit on. Some awards were easy to grant: there are usually only a handful of candidates for the math or music awards, just as there are usually only a handful of serious MVP candidates. But then the committee had to wrestle with two dozen variations on the Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve Award for Outstanding Character, Leadership, Citizenship, Loyalty and Chastity. My fellow educators and I would gamely try to compare this Eagle Scout to that captain of the color guard to the other cheerful lad pulling a B-plus average despite living in his grandpa’s shack in the woods. But what the hell does “citizenship” even mean when applied to a 17-year old? I might vote for the gal who helped organize a march against police brutality. That sounds like outstanding leadership/citizenship to me, but it probably wouldn’t have to Gildersleeve, who instituted the “crew cuts only” bylaw as president of the local chapter Fraternal Order of Water Buffalos in 1962. 

If you are wondering, high school awards committees usually throw up their hands and smear the character/citizenship/grooming/handwriting awards across the kids who ranked 10th through 50th or so in the class, with the top ten splitting the academic awards and the best athletes getting their own clearly-defined honors. It helps that the more impressive the award sounds, the more likely it is to be a $50 series ZZZ savings bond, so the Carter Pewterschmidt Memorial Legacy Ultra-Scholarship for the Student Who Most Exhibits the Characteristics That Would Make Alexander Hamilton Blush and Say “F**k it, You Should Run This Country” ends up having the dollar value of a cheesesteak, fries and a drink. (We would at least try to make sure the kid who lived in the shack got a little cold hard cash.)

Comeback Player of the Year is a little like those Gildersleeve/Pewterschmidt awards. We all know Flacco and Geno won recently and that Chad Pennington won 14 times. (Twice, actually.) Do you remember that Keenan Allen won in 2017? Jordy Nelson in 2016? Common sense and a little memory-jogging should tell you that Tom Brady won in 2009, but that’s like the valedictorian with the free ride to Princeton also getting the Edith Titwillow Typing and Shorthand Award. Rivers, Matthew Stafford, Peyton Manning, and Drew Brees all also have CPOY awards buried on their trophy cases. If I asked you who won the MVP award in some not-too-long-ago year, you would likely figure it out in three or four guesses. If I asked you who won CPOY, you would guess “Pennington,” then give up.

At least the Geno and Flacco awards have more memorable stories behind them than “famous guy got hurt then got better.” If this award really has some “spirit,” some symbolic value or fleeting meaning, then the voters shouldn’t be tied down by mealy-mouthed restrictions. 

I have one last complaint about the language of the guidelines: the phrase missed playing time the previous season. Say a player was on an airplane whose engines caught fire over the Andes two days after the Super Bowl. He bravely leapt into the cockpit and landed the plane, spent six months trudging through the rugged mountains, eschewed cannibalism thanks to a backpack full of Fruit Rollups, stumbled into a Peruvian village with the 200 other survivors he shepherded to safety, grabbed an IV and some roasted guinea pig, hopped on a plane to the states, paid his fine for missing mandatory minicamp (unlike Rodgers, he was not excused), stepped onto the field for the season opener and played at a Pro Bowl level for 17 games. According to language of the new guidelines, he would not be eligible for the Comeback Player of the Year award, because he did not miss any playing time.

A silly example, right? Well, say Hamlin’s injury happened at the end of the last game of the season in 2022. Voting for him in 2023 would have technically been violating the “spirit” of the award.

That’s why less is more when it comes to placing guardrails on what folks consider inspiring or award-worthy. What’s an award-worthy comeback? You’ll know one by how it makes you feel.