The NFL Honors took place on Thursday night and the most anticipated award decision came down to who would win the league MVP between New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye and Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford. What we didn’t see coming was that Los Angeles Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert could be a deciding factor.
In the end, Stafford got the win by just five points in the voting system, which amounted to just one first-place vote, in one of the closest MVP races in years. Stafford received 366 points, Maye 361 points, and Bills quarterback Josh Allen was third all the way back on 91 points. Stafford got 24 first-place votes, Maye 23, and Allen received two.
The biggest shocker was that outside of the top five of the standings, Herbert received a lone first-place vote from out of nowhere.
But instead of having to wait around for the mystery of who the renegade voter was, he quickly revealed himself.
Sam Monson took to social media immediately after the awards were revealed and shared why he voted for Justin Herbert for league MVP.
MVP is the single hardest award to ‘correctly’ determine, because the focus is on ‘value’, which is basically impossible to objectively evaluate with so many dependencies.
But the idea that one vote altered a guy’s legacy is stupid.
More people than not thought each candidate…
— Sam Monson (@SamMonsonNFL) February 6, 2026
Sam Monson’s replies were flooded with people questioning his vote and wanting his credentials to be taken away.
Any non-conforming vote for a major award like NFL MVP is going to be heavily scrutinized. But it’s a very fine line between commending someone for not blindly stepping along with groupthink and thinking that someone is living in an alternate universe.
Anyone who watched Justin Herbert throughout the season knows how “valuable” he was to the Chargers, especially with a porous offensive line. But does that make up for the fact that he finished nearly 1,000 passing yards shy of Matthew Stafford? Or that he was nearly 20 rating points behind Drake Maye? And does that justify a semantical argument about what it really means to be “valuable”? That’s obviously open for debate.
At least Monson looked at the play, the numbers, and made the best decision that he thought for the award. It’s not like he was predisposed to vote for Justin Herbert, say like Dan Orlovsky and Matthew Stafford.
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