Shutdown Corner’s 2014 Midseason NFL Awards

With the NFL regular season about half way done, it’s time to roll out some midseason awards. Who is the MVP at the midpoint of the season? Biggest surprise and disappointment? Shutdown Corner’s Eric Edholm, Jay Busbee and Frank Schwab submit their votes.

(And be sure to check out our first half in review series and our midseason Shutdown Corner All-Pro team on Thursday.)

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MVP
Tom Brady 2, J.J. Watt 1

Eric Edholm (Brady): The ever-impulsive New Englanders wondered after the Monday Massacre in Kansas City if we were watching the Brady demise unfolding. It turns out, the guy still has some pull. But if this season is any indication, this will change 3-4 more times before the playoffs.

Jay Busbee (Brady): How can you not pick Brady? Dude dekes every single one of us with some terrible performances early, then drops the hammer on everyone around him, including — once again — Peyton Manning, the coyote to Brady’s road runner.

Frank Schwab (Watt): I started the Watt campaign early and he has given me no reason to believe I picked the wrong guy. Eric and I debate MVP here:

OFFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR
Ben Roethlisberger 1, DeMarco Murray 1, Andrew Luck 1

EE (Roethlisberger): Ah, thee, prisoner of the moment. Yeah, fine — but this moment has 12 touchdowns and zero picks in the past two games! Chew on that. Still, it does feel as if the Steelers had their moment of clarity right before halftime against the Texans and have been reborn in Big Ben’s arms.

JB (Murray): Murray has been virtually unstoppable for Dallas, and while pretty much everyone expects him to disintegrate in the second half, he’s put the Cowboys in rare, unexpected territory in the first.

FS (Luck): No team in the NFL asks more from one player than the Colts ask from Luck. And he has already delivered more than 3,000 passing yards, a decent full season for most.

DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR
J.J. Watt 3

EE: I’d love to throw some curveball at you, but then I would be being contrarian just for the sake of it. One. Man. Wrecking. Crew.

JB: It’s Watt, of course. Sure wish we could see more of that high school dance commercial. That never gets old. 

FS: Easy.

OFFENSIVE ROOKIE OF THE YEAR
Zack Martin 1, Kelvin Benjamin 1, Sammy Watkins 1

EE (Martin): I went back and forth with Cleveland’s Joel Bitonio (two guards!) for a few hours and actually watched some game tape (perish the thought!) to help decide. Martin might have the better surrounding cast, but he has been just a little cleaner, even with Bitonio having to deal the past few games with no Alex Mack. Martin by the thinnest of slivers.

JB (Benjamin): Like fellow rookie Sammy Watkins in Buffalo, Benjamin is already the primary air weapon for his team … which is not damning with faint praise.

FS (Watkins): I think you have to look even beyond Watkins’ full body of work. I think we all can see now that EJ Manuel was a big reason he took some time to break out. Now he looks like a superstar with Kyle Orton throwing him the ball. Enough said.

DEFENSIVE ROOKIE OF THE YEAR
Khalil Mack 1, C.J. Mosley 1, Anthony Barr 1

EE (Mack): And, honestly, it’s not even that close. (Apologies to C.J. Mosley and Aaron Donald, both of whom have been very, very good, too.) Questions we had on Mack entering the season: Could he play in space and be a quality run stopper? Answers: “Oh” and “yeah.”

JB (Mosley): You’ve got to be something special to fit in with a Ravens defense as a rookie, and with 85 tackles so far this year, Mosley is exactly that.

FS (Barr): I like Mack and Mosley a lot too, but Barr has made some big plays to go with his 58 tackles. His strip, recovery and touchdown to beat the Buccaneers in overtime pushed it to his favor.

COACH OF THE YEAR
Bruce Arians 3

EE: If his team was 3-5, I’d be tempted to give him the award just for his colorful personality. But this snake charmer is coaching the only one-loss team in football and doing so having played three quarterbacks this season and having incurred heavy losses on the defensive side of the ball. No-brainer pick. All hail Bruce Ball.

JB: Whatever black desert magic this guy is perpetuating, it’s working. He’s taken over what was supposed to be the NFL’s toughest division in just nine weeks.

FS: I have two answers. Arians is the coach of the year in the first half. And Bill Belichick will be the coach of the year when the season is over.

SURPRISE OF THE FIRST HALF

EE: The biggest surprise has been just how topsy-turvy the season has been, even by NFL standards. Things we argued three weeks ago have become moot points — but almost certainly will be revisited again in a few weeks. Perhaps it speaks to the quality of play this season (honestly, not that great overall), but it has been like driving through rocky foothills on an oxcart.

JB: Cleveland! Dallas and Arizona, two other nominees for this category, have some success in their DNA. But Cleveland? Who could’ve predicted this, and with Manziel on the bench!

FS: It has to be the Cowboys. I thought this would be a terrible season in Dallas, and I wasn’t alone. They lost the last two games in large part because Tony Romo has been hurt. And maybe his back will be a problem the rest of the year. But I’m not even sure Jerry Jones thought his team would be this good in the first half.

DISAPPOINTMENT OF THE FIRST HALF

EE: What a joke of a division the NFC South is. You have Drew Brees, Matt Ryan and Cam Newton and you can’t win half your games? Bad defense, bad offensive line play and poorly constructed rosters are mostly to blame, although the Saints might be starting their march toward home-field advantage here. Still: meh. This has been a strong division with a new face on top nearly every season. Now we just have a face of mediocrity.

JB: The utterly abysmal NFC South. You draft an all-star team from this division and you probably STILL won’t break .500.

FS: These guys got the wrong division. It’s the NFC West. We thought this was the best division in football by far. But San Francisco has been mediocre, to be kind, and Seattle hasn’t looked like the Seahawks we know since Week 1. And the Rams are chronic underachievers, whose big wins just make you wonder why they look so bad the rest of the time. It’s not out of the question that we get just one playoff team out of these four.

PREDICTED SURPRISE AND DISAPPOINTMENT OF THE SECOND HALF

Edholm and Schwab debate these categories:

STORY OF THE FIRST HALF

EE: We came into this season blinded by NFL bystanders Johnny Manziel and Michael Sam, but it has been the somewhat nameless, faceless Arizona Cardinals playing insanely good team ball and leading the league in wins behind the guidance of Arians. Carson Palmer is 5-0 after it appeared his shoulder injury might put him down for the count. Hosting the Super Bowl? Not a wild idea suddenly.

JB: How much the Ray Rice/Adrian Peterson/Greg Hardy stories stopped being a story. We spent early September outraged; by October, it was back to business as usual.

FS: I think Jay had a great pick, but I’ll go with the unpredictability of the league this year. As I’ve said before, this hasn’t even been parity, with teams trading off winning close games. These are teams that look unbeatable one week and incompetent the next. Think of it this way: Three weeks ago if I had you pick between San Diego and Pittsburgh, you would have laughed at how easy the question was to answer. It’s still just as easy to answer, but the answer has changed. That sums up the 2014 season so far.

REVISED SUPER BOWL PICKS

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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab