After the first five weeks of action, the early race for 2025 NFL MVP seems as wide open as it’s been in any year.
There’s plenty of time for the season to sort itself out, and the league schedule is back-loaded, so several key matchups will happen around the winter holidays. That said, there are several quarterbacks, some of whom usually wouldn’t be conventional candidates, who have a decent chance of getting votes—if not winning the award outright. We haven’t typically needed much guesswork to predict which players will receive votes at season’s end. In fact, there have been only a few clear and consistent qualifications to win the honor—be the most efficient quarterback, win at least 70 percent of your games, and lead your team to the no. 1 or 2 seed in your conference. Recently, the award has gone to the most physically gifted quarterbacks from the best teams: Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and (Packers-era, pre–age cliff) Aaron Rodgers, who have combined to win the past seven MVPs.
But as passing games have become more efficient and the median level of quarterback play rises across the league, we have to make space in the MVP discourse for passers who produce big numbers and win games but aren’t necessarily unanimously considered to be elite. Those players have certainly been making their case nearly a third of the way through the 2025 season; a number of one-loss teams have been led by surprisingly hot quarterbacks, like the Colts with Daniel Jones, the Lions with Jared Goff, and the Buccaneers with Baker Mayfield. If we consider two-loss teams that are trending upward, the MVP field opens considerably to include Seattle’s Sam Darnold, Washington’s Jayden Daniels, Green Bay’s Jordan Love, the Rams’ Matthew Stafford, and New England’s Drake Maye.
We’re seeing those quarterbacks outside that exclusive top tier of performers—such as Brock Purdy with the 2023 49ers and Goff last season—win more often in the regular season. It's a steep climb from “surprisingly good” to “legitimate MVP candidate,” though, and the respective MVP cases for those two QBs were hurt by factors that aren’t usually held against Mahomes or Jackson. Running back Christian McCaffrey (and head coach Kyle Shanahan) received the bulk of the credit for San Francisco’s offensive efficiency two years ago, while Detroit’s coaching, scheme, and roster were seen as propping Goff up last season. In a vacuum, there’s nothing wrong with noting that an offense is relying on forces other than the sole influence of a quarterback, but that kind of hand-waving can serve as a glass ceiling for less athletically gifted passers.
Jackson, a recent MVP winner and perennial favorite, is currently sidelined with a hamstring injury. Mahomes (along with Allen) currently has the best odds to win the MVP award, according to FanDuel, but the Chiefs are scuffling at the start of the year. So Allen, last season’s MVP, seems like the only conventional candidate certain to finish among the top three. I’m taking stock of this wide-open MVP race and ranking the field beyond Allen and Mahomes according to how likely I believe they are to meet the MVP criteria by season’s end. All lines are from FanDuel.
1. Jordan Love (+1400)
Love is tied for the fourth-best MVP odds—likely in part because of the Packers’ push toward becoming a legitimate Super Bowl contender and in part because he’s been playing better than ever in the pocket, with the stats to back it up.
Through five weeks, the Packers have generated 0.24 EPA per dropback. That ranks in the 91st percentile for all offenses since 2015, and it’s the best the Packers have been since Rodgers won MVP in 2020 (when he had a blistering 0.45 EPA per dropback, the best the NFL has seen in the past decade). Love has been efficient in general, but his decision-making on third down and in the red zone has been the most impressive development in his third season as Green Bay’s starter. He’s remained calm in high-leverage situations, and the Packers have largely done an excellent job of keeping him clean in the pocket. Love is second in yards per attempt on third down (just behind Indianapolis and Jones), and his passer rating in the red zone ranks sixth.
The Packers still have five divisional games left, but their schedule isn’t shaping up to be as difficult as those of some of the other quarterbacks on our list. As long as his defense and supporting cast stay healthy, the Packers should win 70 percent of their games, and Love should have enough production to make a legitimate run at MVP.
2. Jared Goff (+1400)
If you’re going to be taken seriously as an unconventional MVP candidate (and especially if you’re a veteran quarterback), you need to have at least broken into the MVP conversation in recent years. Goff did that in 2024, finishing fifth overall in voting after a 4,629-yard, 37-touchdown season in which Detroit won 15 games and finished second in total offense. Goff wasn’t the only contributing force for the Lions, who boasted a stellar offensive line and dynamic run game, but his efficiency as a passer helped mask the impact of injuries to the Detroit defense. Still, his MVP candidacy seemed like it was more or less a nod to his execution of the offense that former coordinator Ben Johnson had designed.
This year, Johnson’s no longer in his headset, and the general assumption before the season started was that Goff would struggle to maintain his excellent form without his former offensive coordinator pulling the strings. In the first five weeks of the season, though, Goff has produced career-high marks across the board. His passer rating (120.7), completion rate (75 percent), and touchdown-to-interception ratio (6:1) are the highest he’s had since he’s been in the league—and he’s doing it behind a worse offensive line than he had last year. If he keeps it up and Detroit wins 12 or more games again, I expect Goff to receive much more respect for his individual contributions this year.
3. Matthew Stafford (+1400)
The MVP award is one way to tell the story of what happened in a given season. Still, it can be difficult for voters to exclude what’s happened across multiple seasons from consideration, especially when the margins are as close as they could be this year. Just last season, we saw Allen win MVP (in large part) not only because he’d been excellent in 2024, but also because enough voters seemed to believe it was his time after he didn’t win in previous years.
I think that the same could be true for Stafford this year. While he was statistically better to start the 2021 season (his best year in Los Angeles) than he’s been through the first five weeks of 2025, he’s building an MVP case. I think that the uncertainty about his future and his perseverance through his back issues this summer will be part of a compelling narrative, especially if he can get through the season healthy and lead the Rams to the NFC West title.
There’s less star power around Stafford in Los Angeles now than in 2021, and I don’t expect receiver Puka Nacua’s impressive production to take away from Stafford’s accolades in the way that former teammate Cooper Kupp did a few years ago, when he won the receiving triple crown. Stafford has built a Hall of Fame–worthy résumé, and winning an MVP on his way out of the league would cement his case for a gold jacket. He might deserve to win strictly on the merits of this season, but his MVP argument is bolstered by the underlying narrative driving his potential last ride for the Rams.
4. Jayden Daniels (+3300)
Sometimes I think I might be the only person left on the Jayden Daniels bandwagon outside of the die-hard Commanders fans. There’s been an overwhelming expectation that Daniels and Washington’s offense would suffer from significant regression in 2025 after winning so many close games in 2024 thanks to Daniels’s fourth-quarter heroics and the team’s unprecedented success with fourth-down conversions during his rookie season.
When Daniels has played this season, though, this offense has been just fine. Washington’s success rate in the passing game is 48 percent when he’s been on the field, ranking just outside the top 10, while Washington’s run game has been nearly unstoppable because Daniels’s speed poses a constant threat to opposing defenses.
A potential obstacle in his MVP path is how tough Washington’s schedule will be the rest of the way. The Commanders still have six games against teams that made the playoffs last year, plus a game against one of this year’s best defenses in the Seahawks. If Daniels can lead the Commanders to wins against his toughest opponents, he can put together an MVP case similar to Jackson’s in 2023—when his performances with both his arms and legs in key games separated him from his peers.
5. Baker Mayfield (+800)
Mayfield picked up a couple of fifth-place votes on MVP ballots last year, a sign that his play has garnered attention and respect from a portion of the national media. Even more importantly, Mayfield has been steadily building an MVP case by performing at a high level over the past three seasons even though he’s had a new offensive coordinator each year in Tampa.
Like Goff, Mayfield is also playing some of the best football of his life right now. He’s been without his starting tackles and several receivers because of injuries, leaving him to create more plays on his own. He’s delivered as a scrambler and has been excellent at extending plays from the pocket to push the ball downfield. His aggression as a passer has been the key reason that Tampa Bay has scored at will over the first five weeks of the season, and he’s established immediate chemistry with rookie receiver Emeka Egbuka.
In spite of what Mayfield has done well and his current MVP odds, which place him behind only Allen and Mahomes, he’s lower on my list because his film doesn’t always support the production. Mayfield has managed to avoid several sacks and has largely been productive when he’s been pressured, but that’s not something he’s been able to rely on throughout his career. If his creativity in the pocket regresses to the mean at all, I worry that he’ll begin to make the kinds of mistakes that will cost him and the Bucs in the close games they’re tending to find themselves in this year.
6. Sam Darnold (+5000)
Sometimes, a quarterback’s reputation can be just as important to the MVP race as their actual performance on the field. It's hard for a quarterback to rub off the stink that comes with being labeled a bust, even if, like Darnold, they’ve bounced back later on in their careers.
Darnold will be fighting skepticism for the rest of his career, even though he just had a strong season with the Vikings in 2024. He’s built on that success to start this year with the Seahawks, posting the best completion rate and passer rating he’s ever had through the first five weeks of a season. His play right now reminds me of Purdy’s in 2023—he’s working within the structure of the offense but taking aggressive chances whenever he can.
The question now is whether it will last. While Darnold has been objectively impressive, we have plenty of data points from the first seven years of his career that indicate he’ll have trouble maintaining this pace for 17 games, especially if the Seahawks offense is unbalanced. Seattle has had a few explosive runs this year, but it struggles to find consistent yardage on the ground. That could eventually put Darnold into a position similar to what we witnessed last year in Minnesota, where he was asked to carry the overwhelming load for his offense on a down-to-down basis.
I worry that as the season wears on, we’ll see less of the efficient but aggressive Darnold and more of the reckless version—and that’ll hurt his MVP case if he starts turning the ball over.
7. Daniel Jones (+2700)
If you’re a fan who closely tracks success rate and EPA, it’s probably hard to conceive of why Colts quarterback Daniel Jones falls outside the top five in this exercise. Ultimately, like Darnold, Jones is a victim of his own reputation. But the biggest thing that could work against Jones is that he’s playing in an offense that features an elite running back. Jonathan Taylor is leading the league in carries, rushing yards, and rushing touchdowns through five weeks, and Indianapolis’s tape reveals that Taylor shoulders a heavier burden than Jones in this offensive scheme. Indianapolis’s current rushing success rate is better than Philadelphia’s from last season, and I expect Indianapolis to keep leaning on Taylor’s legs on early downs. Taylor, at +10,000, is currently tied with Nacua for the best odds of a non-QB to win MVP.
Where Jones has excelled is in punishing defenses when they blitz and taking downfield shots on play-action dropbacks, two things that are influenced by how focused defenses are on stopping Taylor on the ground. If Jones’s receivers turn more of these downfield passes into touchdowns, his efficiency numbers may be too good to ignore. But without that, I doubt that he’ll put up the necessary volume as a passer to convince voters he’s a serious MVP candidate.
8. Drake Maye (+3300)
Patriots quarterback Drake Maye has been another major surprise this season. After a win against Buffalo in prime time on Sunday night, it’s hard to argue that Maye hasn’t been one of the 10 best quarterbacks in the NFL through these five weeks. New England’s offense has converted 51 percent of its passes when facing an attempt of third-and-4 or longer (which ranks second only to Green Bay), and that’s thanks in large part to Maye putting on his superhero cape as a passer and scrambler in tough situations.
Maye is fifth in yards per attempt and sixth in passer rating, so his production is starting to show up in the metrics that voters tend to notice. Ultimately, though, he plays on a team with major talent deficiencies that has enjoyed a pretty soft schedule thus far, outside of the Buffalo game.
It’s hard to see this team winning 11 or more games and claiming one of the top seeds in the conference, things a player typically needs to secure the league’s top award, which makes me believe that we’re a year or two away from a legitimate MVP campaign for the budding star.
Honorable Mentions: Dak Prescott (+1700) and Justin Herbert (+2000)
While I wouldn’t totally cast aside the MVP chances of Prescott and Herbert, you know that something must be wrong with their respective teams if a pair of star quarterbacks finds themselves behind the likes of Jones, Mayfield, and Darnold on a list like this. For both quarterbacks, what’s ailing their teams (and their MVP chances) is totally out of their control.
Prescott is saddled with what might be the NFL’s worst defense this season; the Cowboys defense is on pace to be one of the worst we’ve seen in the past 10 years and still has to face good offenses in games against the Commanders (twice), the Lions, and the Chiefs. Prescott, though, has been incredible, and he could garner some MVP attention like Joe Burrow did on his 9-8 team last year. But don’t expect much real buzz for Prescott, who finished second in the MVP race in 2023, unless he can orchestrate several game-winning drives this year.
The challenge to Herbert’s MVP case stems from underlying issues with Los Angeles’s offense. The Chargers’ total rushing success rate ranks seventh in the NFL, which gives the impression that it’s been consistently efficient. But when you control for runs on third down (as the offense is more likely to run the ball in short-yardage situations), the efficiency falls off a cliff. Los Angeles’s rushing success rate specifically on first and second downs drops to 18th, and the offense has the sixth-lowest rate of explosive runs. Herbert’s receivers haven’t covered themselves in glory, either, as the Chargers are tied for fourth in the number of drops in the NFL, with nine. Add in the injuries to starting tackles Rashawn Slater and Joe Alt, and you have an offense that can’t support its own weight around Herbert, making for an untenable situation for the clearly talented quarterback and a team we still expect to make it to the postseason.
Right now, neither the Cowboys nor the Chargers comfortably project to win enough games to make these quarterbacks real candidates, and, fairly or not, both quarterbacks are under great scrutiny. No matter the context, the responsibility for any team’s failures will be laid at the quarterback’s feet, which probably indicates that neither will be vying for an MVP this year. While these two have both been playing well, predicting an MVP winner isn’t solely done by ranking raw ability or whom you’d draft first for an expansion franchise. Instead, we have to figure out who meets the qualifications demonstrated by decades of voting history.
