While the switch to a 17-game season five years ago made things a little more complicated in terms of records and adding that extra opponent for each team, which doesn’t follow the traditional model for figuring out who everyone’s facing, it actually creates a cleaner mid-point of the season after these first nine weeks. So this is the time to look back and hand out hypothetical awards, if we stopped playing games right now.
Of course, it still makes sense to use per-game statistics here, since about half the league has gone through their bye weeks already. In contrast to my full pre-season predictions – which one of them in particular has already gone up in flames – this doesn’t include the element of projection. Instead, I simply listed the top three candidates based on how I’d vote for each of these awards, along with naming first- and second-team All-Pro units.
Let’s get into it!
