2025 NFL MVP odds, scenarios: It's Drake Maye's award to lose heading into Week 18
Maye had a monster Week 17 game while Matthew Stafford slipped up
By
Jared Dubin
•
2 min read
All throughout the latter portion of the season, we have been keeping tabs on the NFL's MVP race. And all throughout the latter portion of the season, there has been a favorite.
When we did this exercise last week, for example, Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford had -220 odds at DraftKings, giving him an implied 68.8% chance of taking home the trophy.
What a difference a week makes. Stafford's dud on "Monday Night Football" in the Rams' loss to the Atlanta Falcons, combined with Drake Maye's five-touchdown detonation against the New York Jets has totally flipped the narrative and the race.
In the space below, we'll examine the odds and the scenarios for one final time this season, courtesy of DraftKings Sportsbook.
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John Breech
Drake Maye (-400)
Maye's -400 odds at DraftKings give him an implied 80% chance of winning the MVP. That's higher than Stafford had at any point during the MVP watch we've been doing throughout the latter portion of the season.
It would take something pretty incredible happening in the final week of the season for Maye not to win, unless the voting goes significantly differently than the oddsmakers expect. Basically, unless he has a total meltdown, the award is his to lose. If Maye has a representative performance against the Dolphins on Sunday, he is probably going to take it home.
Matthew Stafford (+300)
Stafford entered "Monday Night Football" as the favorite for the award despite the fact that Maye had just thrown five touchdown passes and that his own team was in third place in its own division. But his three-interception game in a loss to the Falcons threw a wrench into everything. Now, he needs to come from behind in order to win.
The Rams plan on playing at least some of their starters in Week 18, Sean McVay said following the loss to Atlanta, but it'll be interesting to see if he sticks to that. The Rams in the past have generally rested guys when only seeding was on the line in the final week of the season.
If Stafford does play, he probably needs to have his single-best game of the year in order to remind people why he was the favorite until this very week, and he needs Maye to fall apart against the Dolphins as well.
Trevor Lawrence and Caleb Williams (+18000)
Justin Herbert and Josh Allen (+30000)
Sam Darnold and Bo Nix (+40000)
Lawrence and Williams each have an implied 0.55% chance of winning MVP, according to these odds. Herbert and Allen have a 0.33% chance. And Darnold and Nix have a 0.25% chance.
In other words, none of them are going to win, and they're likely not going to come close. But they are likely going to garner some down-ballot votes, and what happens this weekend will go a long way toward determining whether those votes are third-, fourth- or fifth-place votes.
If Lawrence and/or Williams can help their team secure the No. 2 seed in the conference, that could help them rise up the board. If Allen plays and dons his Superman cape, the reigning MVP could remind people what he's capable of.
Darnold and Nix seem least likely to land on ballots at all given how much credit their defenses and head coaches get for the teams' successes, but if they put together superb performances to land the top seed in their respective conferences, they could definitely get there.
