Getty Matthew Stafford warms up before a Lions game.
The Detroit Lions have a quarterback in Matthew Stafford who most folks forget was dominating in 2019, but a former NFL quarterback is here to remind everyone what was happening before injury struck.
ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky went back and watched the tape from early in the 2019 season when Stafford was healthy. What he found was a quarterback that he thinks was playing the best football in the entire league at that point at his position.
Go re-watch the first 8 games for the @Lions last year. Matthew Stafford was the best QB in football.
Orlovsky’s take might be shocking to some. Quarterbacks like Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes and company had great seasons. Stafford was on their level until he suffered a back injury which cost him the second half of the year and a chance at team and personal success.
How good would Stafford have finished? Nobody knows, but it’s clear if the player that was around in the beginning of last season shows up in 2020, the team will benefit in a significant way.
Matthew Stafford Called Elite Quarterback
Stafford is clearly valued by folks in the NFL community in a big way. Recently, Bucky Brooks of NFL.com revealed a list of his top 5 quarterbacks who are transcendent in the league right now. Stafford was included, and was included amongst some true luminaries right now at the position.
It’s likely to be controversial for many that Stafford is on the list given his lack of big success in the NFL in terms of wins and losses at this point, but there is little doubting the fact that Stafford has some major talent to rely on at this point. He’s got a great arm and all the tools to dominate.
The hope is Stafford’s talent shines through and he starts to win bigger on the big stage in the future. For now, though, he still makes the cut in terms of elite players at his position in the mind of Brooks and likely plenty of others.
Matthew Stafford Named Potential 2020 NFL MVP by ESPN
That back injury ended up costing Stafford the rest of the 2019 season, but now that he has presumably healed up, the sky could be the limit for the quarterback during the 2020 season. In fact, some already see Stafford as being in the mix for a major award for his play during next season.
ESPN recently put together an Insider piece predicting some outcomes for the 2020 season. When it came to league MVP, there were scant votes for Stafford, but one insider was bold enough to say he thinks the Detroit quarterback could be the league MVP.
In a piece by MLive.com’s Benjamin Raven, the thoughts of ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler from the piece are presented. Here’s a look at what was written by Raven that Fowler shared in the piece:
“The Lions quarterback was playing some of the best ball of his career before going down with fractured bones in his back, though, and his level of play was reason enough for one ESPN analyst to pencil him in as the 2020 NFL MVP.
“Mahomes is still the game’s best player, but Stafford was playing really good football before his midseason back issues,” ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler writes (ESPN Insider). “If he leads Detroit to contention, which isn’t so farfetched considering the talent around him, he’ll be in the MVP mix because he puts up numbers and the NFC North is as open as Kenny Golladay.”
The Lions were arguably getting MVP level play out of Stafford before he got hurt, and the numbers proved that he was acclimating just fine to Darrell Bevell’s new offense in Detroit. Last season, Stafford was cruising along to the tune of 19 touchdowns, 5 interceptions and 2,499 yards. Clearly, he was the most valuable player for the Lions considering what happened to the team when he went down.
The hope is that next season, Stafford can put together just as elite of a year and dominate on the field in similar fashion. If he can, Orlovsky’s take will make plenty of sense to those who might not agree with it now.
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