The NFL MVP Award: Every Multiple Winner in History

The Associated Press has handed out an NFL Most Valuable Player award every year since 1957, and in that time it has been given to exactly two defensive players and exactly one kicker. Everyone else has been a quarterback or a running back, and for the last thirteen years running it has been a quarterback with no exceptions at all. Peyton Manning won it five times, which is one more than anybody else. Only two winners in the award's entire history have been unanimous. This is the story of what the award has actually measured across seven decades, who has won it most, and why the list of names looks so much narrower now than it did in 1972.

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How the Award Works

The MVP is voted on by a panel of 50 sportswriters at the end of the regular season, before a single playoff game is played.

That detail explains a great deal of what follows. The voters are judging seventeen games, not a championship run, which is why a player can be voted the most valuable in the league and then lose in the first round without anybody considering the two results contradictory. The winner is not announced until the day before the Super Bowl, at the NFL Honors ceremony the league has held since 2012, which creates the odd situation of an award being kept secret for a month after it has been decided.

There have been other MVP awards over the years from other organisations. The AP version is the one treated as official, and it is the one this article counts.

Peyton Manning - five, and the record

2003, 2004, 2008, 2009 and 2013.

Four of them came with Indianapolis and the fifth with Denver, five years after the fourth and after a neck injury that cost him an entire season. That last detail is the part of the record that is hardest to appreciate now: he won the award, missed a full year, changed teams, and then won it again at 37.

The 2004 award was close to unanimous at 47 of 48 votes. The 2003 award was shared with Steve McNair in the closest result the award has produced, with Manning taking 16 of 50 first-place votes.

No other player has more than four. The gap between five and four has held for more than a decade.

Aaron Rodgers - four

2011, 2014, 2020 and 2021.

The back-to-back wins in 2020 and 2021 are the reason he sits alone in second, because consecutive MVPs are rare enough that only a handful of players have managed it at all. Ten years separate his first from his last, a span matched only by Manning and Brady.

The Three-Time Winners

Four players have won it three times, and the range of eras is the interesting part.

Jim Brown won in 1957, 1958 and 1965 as a fullback, taking the first two awards ever handed out. Johnny Unitas won in 1959, 1964 and 1967. Brett Favre won three consecutive awards in 1995, 1996 and 1997, the only player to take three in a row. Tom Brady won in 2007, 2010 and 2017, also a ten-year span.

Favre's third, in 1997, was shared with Barry Sanders. It is one of only two ties in the award's history.

Editorial illustration: The NFL MVP Award: Every Multiple Winner in History

The Two-Time Winners

Five players have won exactly twice: Joe Montana (1989, 1990), Steve Young (1992, 1994), Kurt Warner (1999, 2001), Patrick Mahomes (2018, 2022) and Lamar Jackson (2019, 2023).

Three of those five - Montana, Young and Warner - are on the list because of the quarterback-friendliest offenses of their respective eras, which is a pattern rather than a coincidence. Mahomes and Jackson both won a second after a gap of four years, which is what the award looks like when the voters get bored of a name and then come back to it.

The Only Two Defensive Winners

Alan Page in 1971 and Lawrence Taylor in 1986. That is the complete list.

Page was a defensive tackle for Minnesota and won with 16 of 60 votes, the lowest winning share in the award's history, which tells you how badly the vote splintered that year. Taylor, a linebacker for the Giants, won with 41 of 84 and did it in a season where his team also won the Super Bowl.

Nearly forty years have passed since the second of those, and no defensive player has come genuinely close since. That is not because defensive play has stopped mattering. It is because the award is voted on with a spreadsheet, and the offensive spreadsheet is much easier to read.

The Only Kicker

Mark Moseley, 1982, Washington, 35 of 84 votes.

It happened in a strike-shortened season, which is the explanation usually offered, and it remains the only time a specialist has won. He also won the Super Bowl that year, which puts him on a very short list covered further down.

It is worth sitting with how strange this is. A kicker has been voted more valuable than every quarterback in the league exactly once in seven decades, and it happened in the same decade as one of the two defensive winners. Since then the award has narrowed to a single position with occasional exceptions.

The Running Backs, and When They Stopped

For the award's first fifty years, a running back winning was completely ordinary.

Paul Hornung won in 1961 and Jim Taylor in 1962. Larry Brown won in 1972. O. J. Simpson took 74 of 78 votes in 1973, one of the most emphatic results in the award's history. Walter Payton won in 1977, Earl Campbell in 1979, Marcus Allen in 1985, Thurman Thomas in 1991, Emmitt Smith in 1993, Terrell Davis in 1998, Marshall Faulk in 2000, Shaun Alexander in 2005 and LaDainian Tomlinson in 2006 with 88 percent of the vote.

Then it stopped. Adrian Peterson won in 2012 and is the last non-quarterback to win anything. Every award from 2013 through 2025 has gone to a quarterback: Manning, Rodgers, Cam Newton, Matt Ryan, Brady, Mahomes, Jackson, Rodgers twice more, Mahomes again, Jackson again, Josh Allen and Matthew Stafford.

Thirteen consecutive quarterback MVPs is the longest single-position streak in the award's history, and nothing in the current structure of the sport suggests it is about to end. The same forces that emptied the running back position of value are visible in the greatest running backs in NFL history, where almost every entry played before the shift.

Only Two Unanimous Winners

Tom Brady in 2010 and Lamar Jackson in 2019. In sixty-nine years of voting, those are the only two players every single voter agreed on.

The scarcity is a feature rather than an accident. Fifty writers with fifty opinions will nearly always produce at least one dissenting vote, and the winning share is often well under sixty percent. Page won with 21 percent. Manning's 2003 award came from 32 percent of the vote.

When a result is near-unanimous, it usually means the season broke some kind of statistical record that made argument impossible.

Closing illustration for The NFL MVP Award: Every Multiple Winner in History

The Ties, and What They Reveal

Two awards in sixty-nine years have been shared, and both are instructive about how the vote behaves.

In 1997 Brett Favre and Barry Sanders split it. Favre was collecting a third consecutive award, which nobody else has done, and Sanders had run for 2,053 yards - a total only four men in history have passed. The voters could not choose between the quarterback of the moment and the best single running-back season of the decade, so they did not.

In 2003 Peyton Manning and Steve McNair split it, with Manning taking 16 of 50 first-place votes. Thirty-two percent is the second-lowest winning share the award has produced, which tells you the field that year was not two deep but five or six deep, and the result fell where it did almost by accident.

Both ties happened in years where the obvious narrative was missing. When one player has a season that can be described in a sentence, the vote consolidates hard - Manning's 2004 took 47 of 48, Simpson's 1973 took 74 of 78. When no such season exists, fifty writers scatter, and occasionally they scatter evenly enough to produce two winners.

The MVP Super Bowl Problem

Eleven players have won the MVP and the Super Bowl in the same season. Eleven, out of sixty-nine awards.

The list: Bart Starr in 1966, Terry Bradshaw in 1978, Mark Moseley in 1982, Lawrence Taylor in 1986, Joe Montana in 1989, Emmitt Smith in 1993, Steve Young in 1994, Brett Favre in 1996, Terrell Davis in 1998, Kurt Warner in 1999 and Patrick Mahomes in 2022. Of those eleven, all but four were also named Super Bowl MVP - the exceptions being Moseley, Taylor, Favre and Davis.

The more striking number is the gap. After Warner in 1999, no league MVP won a Super Bowl in the same season for 23 years, until Mahomes did it in 2022. Twenty-three consecutive seasons where the most valuable player in the league either missed the final or lost it.

And losing it happened a lot. Warner in 2001, Rich Gannon in 2002, Shaun Alexander in 2005, Brady in 2007, Manning in 2009 and 2013, Cam Newton in 2015, Matt Ryan in 2016 and Brady again in 2017 all won the award and then lost the Super Bowl that same year. Brady's 2007 season ended in the most famous Super Bowl upset of the modern era, and Manning's 2013 award was followed by a 43-8 defeat.

There is no curse in it, just arithmetic. The best individual season in a given year belongs to one player out of more than sixteen hundred, and the championship belongs to one team out of thirty-two. The two have no particular reason to coincide, and the record shows they usually do not.

What the Award Actually Measures

Three things, in descending order of honesty.

The first is passing production on a winning team. That is the single best predictor of an MVP vote in the modern era, and it has been for twenty years. A quarterback who throws for a large number on a team that wins twelve games will beat a quarterback who throws for a larger number on a team that wins eight, almost every time.

The second is narrative availability. The award rewards seasons that can be summarised in a sentence: the comeback, the record, the first year with a new team. Manning's 2013 and Jackson's 2019 both had that quality, and both won overwhelmingly.

The third, and the one nobody likes to say aloud, is position. Two defensive winners and one kicker in sixty-nine years is not a reflection of how football works, it is a reflection of what is easy to count. The men who dominate the greatest pass rushers in NFL history and the greatest linebackers in NFL history changed games as thoroughly as any quarterback and have one trophy between the two lists.

That is the fairest summary of the award: it is a very good record of who threw the ball best on a good team, and a very poor record of who was actually most valuable. Both of those things can be true, and the voters would mostly agree with them.