Josh Allen heads into the 2026 season as the favorite to do something only a handful of quarterbacks have ever done: win a second MVP in a three-year window. ESPN's awards tracker has him sitting atop the board, and if you've watched him bulldoze defenders since 2020, none of this surprises you.

Let me tell you why this matters beyond the ticket. The MVP used to be a career-achievement award with a schedule. You'd win it once, maybe twice if you were Montana or Unitas, and then the voters moved on to somebody new. Now it's practically a quarterly subscription for elite quarterbacks. Allen won it, then somebody else won it, and here he is again at the top of the board. That's the modern cycle at work: stay healthy, throw 35-plus touchdowns, win 12 games, and the trophy finds your mailbox.

And the pattern holds. Since 2000, only two non-quarterbacks have won it, and both were seasons for the ages, Adrian Peterson grinding out 2,000 yards on a rebuilt knee in 2012 being the one everybody remembers. Remember how that felt? A running back dragging a franchise to the playoffs already felt like a black-and-white movie by the time it happened. The award belongs to quarterbacks now, and the odds board reflects it. Scroll down ESPN's list and you'll find passers stacked like cordwood before you hit the first defensive player, who's usually hanging around 40-to-1 like a lottery ticket taped to a refrigerator.

The Rookie of the Year races are where the real gambling stories live, though. Offensive Rookie of the Year has become the quarterback-and-running-back show, with the occasional receiver crashing the party like Ja'Marr Chase did in 2021 when he turned Cincinnati's offense into a fireworks stand. Defensive Rookie of the Year is the chaotic cousin, the one that's been known to go to a fourth-round linebacker nobody drafted in fantasy because tackles and chaos plays don't make highlight reels but they do make voters swoon. Remember when Sauce Gardner took it in 2022 as a corner? Corners almost never win it. That kind of value is what makes September betting slips interesting.

Coach of the Year is the sneaky one, and here comes my annual warning: it almost always goes to the guy whose team surprised everybody, which means the smart play isn't the big name, it's the coach of a team coming off six or seven wins that just upgraded at quarterback. The award should be called Coach of the Overreaction, but that's a rant for another day. Dave Morgan, our analytics guy, would tell you the market undervalues that angle every single year, and for once I think the kid's right. The data backs the story here, not the other way around.

Now, my standard sermon, which longtime readers can recite by heart: I treat awards futures like a hobby, not a paycheck. The season is long, and Week 1 lies more than any week on the calendar, as I wrote before the opener. An MVP favorite in September is a coin flip with better production value by November. Injuries happen, offenses sputter, some rookie running back you've never heard of rips off six weeks of 120-yard games and turns the whole board upside down.

So do your homework. Follow the board as it moves, because those line shifts tell you where the money's going and the money is usually studying harder than you are. And if you put a few dollars on Allen to win his second MVP in three years, understand you're betting on him staying upright for 17 games behind that Bills line, which is the real prize fight hiding under the trophy talk.

Me, I'll be watching the Defensive Rookie board. That's where the history gets made by guys nobody saw coming, and that's been the best part of this job for forty years.