The 2023 MVP race ended on New Year’s Eve in Baltimore with seven days left in the regular season. Depending on what John Harbaugh decides to do, Week 17 also might be the last we see of Lamar Jackson until the third weekend in January when the divisional round of the AFC playoffs commence—not that voters should need to see anything else.
The Baltimore Ravens’ 56–19 bludgeoning of the playoff-bound Miami Dolphins put a stamp on all of that.
Jackson essentially locking up his second MVP award a week shy of his 27th birthday is impressive in its own right. He’ll be the 11th player to win multiple MVPs—seven of the other 10 are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame—and the three that aren’t are Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes. Jackson will also be the same age as Brett Favre, Peyton Manning and Mahomes when they won their second—Jim Brown won his second at 22.
Which is all great. But maybe just as impressive is how this award will have been won in a significantly different way than how Jackson won his first.
The cool part for the 26-year-old phenom? Sunday’s deconstruction of Jackson’s hometown Dolphins might best be remembered by most for something someone else did, and on a play that was consequential to the Ravens running away with this one.
You know it for what Odell Beckham Jr. did. It was at the midpoint of the second quarter, and the Ravens were down 10–7. On second-and-8 from the Miami 34, Beckham made a catch along the right sideline for a 33-yard gain that looked like the two-handed cousin of the iconic one-hander he pulled off nine years ago as a Giants rookie. The play put Baltimore at the 1-yard line and in position to take a lead it’d never give back.
What you don’t know is what happened that snap.
“I’d seen man coverage, and I love O.B. versus anyone one-on-one—I love any one of my receivers one-on-one with anybody,” Jackson told me, calling from the tunnel inside M&T Bank Stadium. “I’d seen No. 4 [Kader Kohou] guarding him, and I just checked to a different route. O.B. just did what O.B. do—made a tremendous catch, got his feet down inbounds. It was wonderful. O.B. did all of that. I just had to give him a chance.”
Jackson was, of course, humbly passing off credit. But as our conversation continued, it became more and more clear that the play was as much a sign of a young quarterback’s growth, and his team’s undying trust in him to put that growth on the field, as it was another guy’s brilliance.
It was also a perfect example, again, on how the 2023 MVP is different from the 2019 MVP.
