San Francisco, NFL Honors, and Matthew Stafford is standing at a podium he never figured he'd reach at 37 years old. Five points. That's the margin — 366 to 361 over Drake Maye, the tightest MVP vote since 2003, 24 first-place ballots to 23, close enough that you could feel the room exhale when they finally read his name. 

Let's not forget: This is a guy who spent a decade in Detroit answering questions about whether he'd ever be more than a stat-compiler on a losing team. Now he's got 4,707 passing yards, 46 touchdowns, a career-low eight picks, a 109.2 rating, First-Team All-Pro for the first time in his life, and a trophy in his hands. And what does he say? Not a victory lap. Not a farewell tour. He tells the room he's coming back — not to collect another one of these, but because the Rams lost the NFC Championship 31-27 to Seattle, and he wants one more ring before he hangs up the cleats. 

And online betting sites think that he has the best chance in the five seasons since the Rams' last Super Bowl triumph. The early Lucky Rebel NFL team odds ahead of the 2026 season make Stafford's Rams the clear +550 favorite to hoist the Lombardi on home turf at SoFi Stadium next February, just as they did the last time the Big Game was played in their home stadium. But while they are the favorites for the championship-winning team odds, Stafford isn't the favorite to retain his MVP award. Here are the four names who are the frontrunners. 

Josh Allen: +550

This is the cruelty of Josh Allen's situation: he's got the MVP, the extension — six years, $330 million — and five straight seasons of 40-plus total touchdowns, a run nobody else in the league has managed even three years in a row. Last year, he was the only player in football with 3,000 passing yards and 500 rushing yards in the same season. None of it answers the one question that follows him onto every podcast and into every offseason profile — where's the Super Bowl? 

Buffalo beat Jacksonville in the Wild Card round, then lost in overtime in Denver, and that ending cost Sean McDermott his job. The only coach who ever got Allen this close is gone, replaced by Joe Brady, a first-timer, and Allen's rehabbing a broken bone in his foot. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's the difference between another MVP case and a September that never gets off the ground.

Lamar Jackson: +650

"Devastating." That's Lamar Jackson's own word for 2025, and when a two-time MVP — a guy some people still think got robbed of a third in 2024 — uses that word about his own season, you listen. Hamstring, toe, ankle, knee, back — his body just stopped cooperating, one injury bleeding into the next until he'd made only 13 starts, thrown for a modest 2,549 yards, and Baltimore had crawled out to a 1-5 start it never recovered from. 

They finished 8-9. Missed the playoffs for the first time since 2021 on a missed field goal. John Harbaugh, 18 years in, was let go. So, what does "clean slate" even mean for a quarterback who hasn't finished a full healthy season in years? It means everyone in Baltimore is telling you he's rested, he's recovered, he's ready — and it means nobody can actually promise you that. When healthy, nobody in football has a higher ceiling. "When" is the key part of that sentence. 

Joe Burrow: +800

Sit with this number: fourth in MVP voting, twice, without a single first-place vote. That's Joe Burrow's résumé heading into a season where the whole conversation is still about whether his body will let him finish a full campaign. Last year it didn't. 

A turf toe injury in Week 2 — the kind nobody sees coming — needed surgery and cost him nine games, and by the time he came back on Thanksgiving, Cincinnati was already buried, out of the race by Week 15. In the games he did play, he was throwing 17 touchdowns against five picks, which tells you everything about what this offense looks like when he's upright. 

The Bengals went out and traded for Dexter Lawrence this offseason, kept Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins and Chase Brown in place, built the roster like a team that believes in him. The schedule is kind, but does any of it matter if he's watching from a treatment table again in October? That's the whole bet Cincinnati keeps making.

Drake Maye: +1000

Drake Maye's rise was the big story of 2025. He arrived out of nowhere to lead the Patriots to an AFC Championship win and was runner-up to Stafford in one of the closest MVP votes in league history, falling just one first-place ballot short in an astonishing sophomore season. 

The numbers back it up: a league-leading 72 percent completion rate, 4,394 yards, 31 touchdowns, and a 113.5 rating, good for a Pro Bowl selection. New England went 14-3 and rode that form to Super Bowl LX, where a dominant Seattle defense proved too much in a 29-13 defeat. Since then, though, the Pats have retooled. 

They landed A.J. Brown in a blockbuster trade with Philadelphia, finally giving Maye the true number-one receiver his offence had been missing. The catch is a far tougher schedule after benefiting from one of the softest slates in recent memory in 2025. Consider what it means for New England that last year's runner-up now has a genuine top target and a much harder path to prove himself against. To go one better, Maye needs to prove last year wasn't schedule-inflated.