Offensive Player of the Year Betting Market Review
Offensive Player of the Year Betting Market Review
Historical trends heavily favor wide receivers winning the award, but don't count out quarterbacks
The strongest impression I got researching historical data and trying to apply insights for Offensive Player of the Year (OPOY) is that it’s truly a strange award. It’s often seen as the non-quarterback offensive skill player award, yet quarterback have won it nine times in the last 20 seasons. There’s no analytical stat that correlates with winning the award, like I had found for quarterback expected points added (EPA) per play and Most Valuable Player. A tight end has never won the award (established in 1972), despite the fact that most football observers commonly acknowledge that Rob Gronkowski and Travis Kelce were the most important complementary players to the strongest GOAT candidate quarterbacks. And none of the 51 historical award winners have played for a losing team, even though we know a single elite non-quarterback can’t theoretically lift an otherwise mediocre team to the playoffs.
With the peculiarity of OPOY established, I’ll emphasis that there is still enough left to extract from the historical award trends to apply specifically to this year’s betting markets. Plus, the difficulties in our understanding of the award’s voters’ perceptions are just as confounding for bookmakers, arguably leaving a less efficient market for us to exploit.
In this analysis, I’ll go through the three major positional candidates for the award: quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers. Each has a unique profile for what OPOY voters have rewarded in the past, with some similar characteristics. Like I found in my MVP betting market analysis, there are a few strongly held beliefs about the market that aren’t backed by historical evidence, and I lean heavily towards the predictive power of the latter.
QUARTERBACK
As I mentioned above, quarterback have won nearly half of the OPOY award over the last 20 years, betray the impression that it’s a strictly non-quarterback award. It’s certainly not been the case that awarding the MVP to a quarterback disqualifies him for OPOY, as eight of the nine quarterback winners since 2003 also won MVP, with Drew Brees the exception in 2011 (Aaron Rodgers was MVP). Voters ideally want to give the award to a non-quarterback, but only for recognition of a truly outstanding season that is combined with team success. Often, there isn’t a non-quarterback who fits those parameters, leading to voters defaulting to voting for the same player as MVP and OPOY.
The recent market could be trending towards a lower proportion of quarterbacks winning the awards, with four straight non-quarterback winners since Patrick Mahomes won in 2018. But quarterback won the award eight of the prior 12 years from 2007-2018, and we’ve seen longer streaks of non-quarterback winners (1996-2003, eight years) reverse in the past. In last year’s voting, the second and third place finishers in OPOY voting were quarterbacks (Mahomes and Jalen Hurts), the top-three non-winners were quarterbacks three years ago, and Lamar Jackson’s 17 votes in 2019 were only two behind Michael Thomas’s winning total.
Structurally, there are probably advantages for non-quarterbacks winning the award with the lengthening of the season to 17 games, making optically significant benchmarks for rushing and receiving production easier to hit, which appear to be a strong driver of who wins the award. If a running back hits 2,000 rushing yards, he’s very likely to win the award, even if it’s an easier hurdle than when Derrick Henry and Chris Johnson both won OPOY in recent 16 games seasons.
It’s likely incorrect to assume quarterbacks will continue to win the award at near a 50% clip, but discounting it to 5-10% is even more wrong, in my opinion. I showed earlier that Mahomes is likely an MVP value at +700 (12.5% implied odds), so his best-available OPOY odds of +2800 (3.4%) look like a decent value, assuming the he also take home OPOY once for every 3-4 times he wins MVP. At the very least, Mahomes shouldn’t have longer odds available than multiple other quarterbacks, including Lamar Jackson (+2200), Jalen Hurts (+2500) and Justin Fields (+2500). Only two of the 20 quarterback OPOY winners came in years when another quarterback won MVP.
RUNNING BACK
The running back’s grip on the award has loosened greatly in recent years, and it’s hard to argue that this trend is going to reverse. From the award’s inception in 1957 to 2018, only one non-quarterback and non-running back won the award: Jerry Rice in 1987 and 1993. In the last four seasons, three different wide receivers have been OPOY.
There are still some safe ways to assume a running back will win the award. As I mentioned earlier, a 2,000-yard rushing season is going to be enough to win the award. Total scrimmage yards appears to also be important, with Todd Gurley leading the NFL in 2017, DeMarco Murray in 2014, and Adrian Peterson in 2012. You have to go back to 2006 to find an running back OPOY who didn’t lead the NFL in scrimmage yards, and LaDainian Tomlinson’s 2,323 yards would have been enough to lead the NFL in most seasons, and it came with 31 total touchdowns (he was also MVP).
Tomlinson’s 2006 OPOY illustrates another important part of the discussion: your team needs to win. The leader in scrimmage yards that season was Steven Jackson, with an incredible 1,528 yards rushing and another 806 receiving. But his St. Louis Rams went 8-8 and didn’t make the playoffs. Only twice has a player on a team without a winning record won the award. Once, Chris Johnson hit the 2K threshold in rushing yards, and the other was Priest Holmes in 2002. For Holmes, missing the last two games of the season may have bolstered his case for OPOY, as the Chiefs offense faltered, losing 24-0 in the final week of the season to the Raiders while accumulating a total of 176 offensive yards.
RECEIVER
While I like to look at more useful, but opaque stats like my NFL Plus/Minus metric to make conclusions about non-quarterback value, the voters disagreed heavily with my assessment that Tyreek Hill was the clear offensive player of 2022, instead focusing on Justin Jefferson’s marginally better counting stats. This analysis is focused on trying to predict who will win OPOY, not who should, so I’m going to rely heavily on counting stat projections for receivers, primarily receiving yards.
There are a ton of tailwinds to receiver production that are going to continue helping them win the award. As mentioned above, they’ve won three of the last four after being an afterthought the previous six decades. This has come with the context of exploding receiving numbers across the league, and declining candidates at running back to get the type of workhorse usage to accumulate the counting stats to win.
Three of the top-6 seasons for receiving yards in NFL history have come in the last four seasons, with each player winning OPOY (Jefferson, Cooper Kupp and Michael Thomas). For rushing yards, only one of the top-17 seasons has come in the last 10 years, despite more overall offensive production and a lengthening of the season to 17 games. You’re much more likely to get a “historic” receiving season than rushing season, whether receiver talent is relatively better or not to their running back contemporaries. Running back are more involved in the passing game than ever before, yet Christian McCaffrey (2019) is the only running back in the last 10 years to break into the top-10 all-time scrimmage yard seasons. Thomas won OPOY in 2019 over McCaffrey the same season he had the third most scrimmage yards ever, heavily influenced by McCaffrey’s Panthers finishing the season at 5-11 versus Thomas’s Saints at 13-3.
Going back to the contrast between last year’s production for Hill and Jefferson reveals an important variable to factor into the analysis: routes run percentage. Both Hill and Jefferson played 17 games, yet the latter ran 42 more routes, the equivalent of more than an extra game’s worth of opportunity to accumulate stats. Is wasn’t that the Vikings were a more pass-heavy team, it was that Jefferson ran routes on 96.7% of his team’s passing plays, whereas Hill was only at 86.5%. Hill was more efficient in production than Jefferson by every pre-route stat, but that isn’t want moves the needle for voters. As much as I think Hill has a great chance of being the most valuable receiver in 2023, the OPOY voters will likely disagree with the headwind of his lower routes-run percentage, which has only topped 95% once in his career.
YOU PLAY TO WIN THE GAME
With the positional arguments broken down, here are my thoughts on the best +EV bets you can make in the current OPOY markets, focusing heavily on wide receivers due to the aforementioned structural trends.
Patrick Mahomes is my favorite quarterback choice, and likely a value at +2800. Again, refer to my MVP analysis for the full breakdown on why he’s the clear quarterback MVP pick, which correlates strongly with OPOY.
Ja’Marr Chase is probably a better value than Justin Jefferson (both around +1200), mostly because his team is much more likely to succeed this season. Like Jefferson, Chase is an extreme route runner at 100% of team passing plays last season, but the Bengals are also one of the best teams in the NFL. The Bengals have an implied probability to make the playoffs in betting markets at roughly 75%, and the Vikings are at basically a coin-flip, skewed towards missing.
Davante Adams a receiver with medium odds (+2800, 3.4% implied probability) who checks a lot of boxes for the potential to accumulate strong counting numbers this season. Adams ran routes on 99.7% of Raiders pass attempts and led the NFL in target share (32.6%) last season. Jimmy Garoppolo could be a downgrade at quarterback, but Adams’s connection with Derek Carr wasn’t very efficient. Adams only had a 55.5% catch rate, down from 72.8% in 2021, and he also had 9 drops (5%). With a regression in per-target efficiency, Adams is as well-positioned as anyone to lead the NFL in receiving yards. The downsides for Adams are age (30) and team strength, but I think those concerns are built into his odds. The Raiders are unlikely to make the playoffs in a sacked AFC (25% implied probability), but their projected win total isn’t drastically low at 7.5.
My favorite arbitrage is long Chris Olave (+8000) and short Garrett Wilson (+3000), with the former at an implied probability nearly 3x higher than his former college teammate. Olave’s chance to win offensive rookie of the year over Wilson suffered from the same bias we saw with Jefferson and Hill in OPOY: counting numbers over efficiency.
Olave finished with 60 fewer receiving yards than Wilson and the same number of touchdowns, but on 165 fewer routes. Olave’s 2.4 yards per route run led all rookie receivers with at least 50 targets, and was sixth among all receivers in the NFL, trailing only Hill, Jefferson, A.J. Brown, Jaylen Waddle and Adams. Olave’s route participation rate wasn’t outstanding at 88.1%, but he was hampered by injury, and rookie’s tend to vastly underperform their career rates as they ramp up during the season.
If you must make a running back pick, I agree with a lot of others pointing to Nick Chubb as a value (+3500), but the market has already moved a little to shorten his odds. The case for Chubb is the upside case for the Browns generally with Deshaun Watson returning to form, plenty of rushing opportunity and Kareem Hunt currently a free agent. I’m not Chubb will be much of a receiving threat without Hunt, but hitting a 2,000 rushing yard season is likely enough to make him a value, and that alone should be enough to secure the award.
It’s a low-probability event, but Josh Jacobs at +6000 should have a little value. Jacobs is coming off of a season leading the NFL in scrimmage yards, and the addition of Garoppolo could lead to more overall team success. Garoppolo isn’t seen as being nearly as good of a quarterback as his numbers indicate, so the credit for team improvement will be portioned out to others, and if Jacobs has the exact same season as 2022, but the Raiders make the playoffs, he’ll be strongly in the OPOY conversation.