Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Most Valuable Shiny Person

I'm not going to go into too much depth on this, because it's something that's hammered at by the bowel movement that shows up on Tuesdays and has corn in it over at the World Wide Lemur... but here's a fun trivia question. Name the two offensive linemen ever to be named Most Valuable Player in the National Football League. (Boy, I felt just like Ron Jaworski there, breaking out the full three word presidential assassin name.)

Give up? That's wise, given how neither of these guys probably played in your lifetime. They would be Pete Retzlaff, an Eagle TE in 1965 when the Maxwell Club decided to keep the Uppity Jim Brown in his place and vote for the local white man... and the immortal Mel Hein, who put the Heiney in the center position for the New York Football Giants in 1938.

So here's the gist, folks... in the nearly 70 years that they've been giving these things out, and for the last 42 years, no offensive lineman has ever been the most valuable player in the league. Not in 1982, when Mark Moseley, a straight ahead kicker for the Redskins, won it. Not in 1988, when the voters decided that Boomer Esiason and Randall Cunningham had to have it. Not in 2002, when Rich Gannon dinked and dunked his way to the hardware. And not in 2005, when Steve Hutchinson cleared the earth for Shawn Alexander's MVP award. Boy, Alexander's done a lot since Hutchinson left.

Stop calling it the MVP. Call it the Best Skill Player. Then also, the Best Line Player. How hard is this, really?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

*golf clap*