The race for LVP

Some people like to follow the race for MVP. Is it Peyton Manning or Drew Brees? Maybe Favre should be thrown in the mix.

I, on the other hand, am fascinated by the race for LVP. As far as I can tell, it's down to Derek Anderson and JaMarcus Russell. Maybe this happens every year, but I don't recall two QBs in the same season having such awful years. Sure, there are some other bad players in the league. Allen Barbre is an awful RT for the Packers. C.C. Brown is a disaster at safety for the Giants. I'm not even convinced Orlando Pace can walk anymore, let alone play LT for the Bears.

But we all know these awards go to QBs. Hey, if they're the most valuable they should also be the least valuable. Let's size up the contenders.

Derek Anderson: 43% completion percentage, 2 TDs, 9 INTs, 4.4 yards per attempt, 36.2 rating

Comments: Now that's pretty damn awful. The fact that the Browns keep trotting this guy out each week seems laughable. I understand they don't want to pay Quinn his playing time incentives, but how about the 3rd stringer Brett Ratliff? I have a hard time believing he could do worse than this. I have a hard time believing an NFL QB could do this. That rating is worse than if he threw nothing but incompletions.

JaMarcus Russell: 48% completion percentage, 2 TDs, 9 INTs, 5.5 yards per attempt, 48.3 rating

Comments: I gotta say, at the beginning of the year I thought Russell was going to run away with this award. I still think by the end of the year he's going to have a historically bad season considering the attempts he'll get, and frankly I'm rooting for it. But by some miracle, he has been better than Anderson this year. If the Browns had stayed with Quinn and accepted his 62 rating, Russell would have this award locked up. But it's like the Browns saw the Raiders beating them in some act of futility, and just couldn't allow that to happen. Kinda like how on draft day the Raiders wasted a top-10 pick on Heyward-Bey, but the Browns somehow outdid them by trading down a couple times and drafting a center.

In these guy's defense, I will say their receivers are awful. The Browns traded away their top two receivers and replaced them with basically nothing. The Raiders have surrounded Russell with two rookie receivers who on one play Sunday tripped over each other. But with that said, these are some awful seasons. And as bad as Russell's been, he's actually picked up his play just a tad the past couple of weeks, while Anderson has dropped his level of play considerably since his first start against Cincinnati. In an upset, Derek Anderson truly is the league's LVP.