Can McCaffrey break QB hold on MVP?

Given the litany of events that take place across an NFL Sunday, it’s somewhat surprising that, from around Thanksgiving onwards, discussion at the business end of the regular season is framed primarily by one overarching question: who will win the MVP?

Without fail every year the question is asked as early as the opening few weeks of the campaign, but the debate ratchets up significantly as autumn turns to winter and the contenders separate themselves firmly from the pretenders.

The San Francisco 49ers are cemented not only as a contender to win Super Bowl 58 in Las Vegas, but as the prohibitive favourite to lift the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Their Week 15 win over the Arizona Cardinals saw the 49ers become the first team in the 2023 to clinch their division, winning the NFC West for the second successive year.

It marked the first time the 49ers have retained a division title since the 2012 season, and such has been the dominant nature of their performances this term that they left the Cardinals game in the unique position of having that MVP conversation centre around two of their players.

Typically, it’s a question of whether the award must go to a quarterback. Brock Purdy is in the driver’s seat to win the award following an incredible first full season as the starting quarterback in which he has made a mockery of his position as the last pick of the 2022 draft by reaching substantially greater heights than he did during his shock seven-game winning streak that took the 49ers to the brink of Super Bowl 57.

But he has a rival with a compelling CV in his own locker room, and Purdy tactfully endorsed the resume of running back Christian McCaffrey after the 49ers’ division-clinching win.

“Dude, I think Christian should be MVP,” Purdy said following a four-touchdown performance in his first NFL game in his home state of Arizona.

It was easy for Purdy — who, at the time of writing, led the NFL in passing touchdowns (29), every yards per attempt metric and every measure of quarterback efficiency — to give such a response and it be deemed acceptable, given McCaffrey had caught two of those touchdowns and ran for another in a spectacular hat-trick, taking his tally of scores against the Cardinals in the season to seven, tied for the most in the same campaign by a single player in the Super Bowl era. 

The mere notion of a running back winning the MVP award has essentially become an absurdity in the modern NFL, the devaluation of what was once the glamour position of the sport in part a product of the extreme physicality that helped create its mystique. The combination of the often short shelf life in running backs and the rise in analytics that definitively affirmed passing the ball as being vastly more efficient than running it leads most conversations about them to quickly deteriorate into tired and tedious discussions about their value.

There were plenty of such discussions when the 49ers traded for McCaffrey in October 2022, with many believing San Francisco had paid too high a price for his services when they sent a second, third and fourth-round pick in 2023 and a 2024 fifth-rounder to the Carolina Panthers.

McCaffrey has made those observers look increasingly foolish with a succession of devastating performances since then. After playing sparingly in his debut, the 49ers won all 10 of the games in which he started in the 2022 regular season, with the only defeat he suffered coming in an NFC Championship Game that saw San Francisco literally run out of healthy quarterbacks.

Indeed, McCaffrey’s value to the 49ers is now indisputable, and to even glance at his numbers is to see a jaw-dropping illustration of that worth.

At the time of writing, McCaffrey had compiled 2,038 rushing yards at an average of 5.1 yards per carry and scored 19 touchdowns on the ground since his trade to the 49ers. On top of that, he had caught 109 passes for 973 yards and 11 touchdowns. His 3,011 yards from scrimmage since the trade were 431 more than his nearest challenger, Tyreek Hill (2,580), with his 30 touchdowns six more than former 49ers running back Raheem Mostert (24).

As has been the case with Purdy, McCaffrey has spent the 2023 campaign writing his name into various pages of the record books as the 49ers have surged to the top of the NFC, compiling an 11-3 record through the first 14 games. In Week 8, McCaffrey tied the NFL record for the most consecutive games (including the postseason) with a touchdown, finding the endzone in 17 successive outings.

He narrowly missed out on the outright record but, in the win over the Cardinals, he became only the third player in NFL history with at least 6,000 rushing yards and 4,000 receiving yards in his first seven seasons, following in the footsteps of 49ers legend Roger Craig and Hall of Famer Marshall Faulk, both players who made their name with their versatility. McCaffrey also joined Faulk in becoming the second player with 30 career games with at least 50 rushing yards and 50 receiving yards.

Play-action fakes command serious respect with McCaffrey in the backfield, but of even greater concern to opponents is how McCaffrey moves around the backfield before the snap, often in tandem with the game’s most versatile wide receiver, Deebo Samuel.

Kyle Shanahan’s offense is a symphony of motion. Plays on which the 49ers don’t use it are tremendously rare, with the head coach employing it incessantly to create blocking angles in the run game, identify and manipulate coverages and generate matchup nightmares for defenders.

The level of conflict in which defenders find themselves since McCaffrey’s arrival has increased exponentially, with he and Samuel constantly motioning in and out of the backfield, forcing defenses to adjust accordingly because of the damage Samuel and McCaffrey can each do as both a runner and a receiver.

The results of their dual gravitational pull are emphatic. Purdy is frequently able to attack gaping chasms in coverages after defenses have been pulled from pillar to post, while McCaffrey consistently lays waste to helpless linebackers placed in the impossible situation of covering him one on one thanks to Shahanan’s expert deployment of his two multi-faceted playmakers. 

Against Arizona, Purdy threw three touchdowns to receivers who had at least 10 yards of separation from the nearest defender, including a 41-yard pass on which McCaffrey was able to fall down while catching the ball, get up and stroll into the endzone without ever being touched.

As of Week 15, only Austin Ekeler of the Los Angeles Chargers (138) had received more targets than McCaffrey (133). Much of that is by design — nothing in the Shanahan offense happens by accident — but not all of his receptions see him schemed into wide-open space downfield. That huge number of targets is also a product of McCaffrey being arguably the most valuable checkdown option in the NFL, regularly transforming plays where the quarterback has been forced to turn to him as a last resort with nothing open elsewhere into huge gains. At the time of writing, McCaffrey was averaging seven yards after the catch per reception.

McCaffrey may not have the same speed he had early in his career, but he remains a field-flipping runner who can rip off a game-changing play at any point. He boasts excellent vision to find running lanes and superb elusiveness to evade defenders, and he blends that with a physicality that has allowed him to fit effortlessly into a run game that is much more varied than it was when Shanahan took over in 2017. 

It has become apparent that, when the 49ers dealt for McCaffrey, they traded for the archetypal Shanahan running back, with his impact with and without the ball making it near impossible for him to be taken off the field, even in games where he is slightly affected by injury. McCaffrey still played 77 percent of the snaps against the Cardinals despite carrying a minor knee issue.

Said Shanahan after that win: “When he [McCaffrey] touches the ball, when he doesn’t have the ball. When he’s blocking, when he is carrying out his fakes, everything. The type of guy he has been, the way he works, the way he prepares. How well he takes care of his body throughout the entire offseason, throughout every single day. He’s as committed to his job as any person I’ve ever been around. He’s also one of the best players I’ve been around.

“You just want to know when he’s out. I think he took a few [plays] off [with the injury] and sometimes, when he takes a couple off to rest something, it’s never like he can’t go back in. He wants to go back in, we are just patient depending on what we are doing. We are trying our hardest to give other people opportunities, but it is extremely hard to do that with a guy like him.”

The opportunities for McCaffrey to further his case will be plentiful over the closing weeks of the regular season. Should he continue to take them with the same spectacular efficiency that has defined his first full season with the 49ers, he could have the opportunity to be the first non-quarterback to win the MVP since running back Adrian Peterson did so in 2012.

Since Peterson’s win, the notion that running backs are inherently replaceable has taken hold. As Shanahan articulated, McCaffrey is essentially irreplaceable for the 49ers. He rarely comes off the field and has an outsized impact on all aspects of their offense. An outlier in an era that has long since abandoned the idea of his position being one of the most important on the field, McCaffrey’s 2023 season has been an encapsulation of how valuable running backs with skill sets malleable to the modern game can be, and the mere fact he has done enough to make voters wrestle with the idea of picking a non-quarterback is perhaps the most compelling reason why he should be that non-quarterback.