Even after the criteria had been “revised”
Sam Darnold, despite what he’s done for the Minnesota Vikings, likely won’t get so much as a vote in the NFL Most Valuable Player balloting for this year. However, it’s now possible that he could end up winning an award that it was previously thought he was ineligible for.
Today, the Associated Press (as reported by Pro Football Talk) said that any votes its members cast for Darnold for the Comeback Player of the Year Award would not be rejected, despite the AP revising the criteria for the award some time ago.
Last year, the AP gave the Comeback Player of the Year Award to Joe Flacco, who showed up in Cleveland for five games and cleared the relatively low bar of being less awful than DeShaun Watson. This offseason, the AP declared that they had revised their criteria for the award so that it would “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.”
It looked like that would have disqualified Darnold for being eligible for the award, unless “other circumstances” covers being on your fourth NFL team because the first two you were with were such disasters they nearly qualified for federal aid.
So far this season, Darnold has been credited with more victories in 16 games with Minnesota than he was credited with in the three seasons he spent with the New York Jets and has blown past his previous career highs in every major statistical category. Like I said in the opener, he won’t even get a sniff of the MVP Award, but his season deserves some sort of significant recognition, and if that comes in the form of the Comeback Player of the Year Award, that’s just fine.