Award voters in the NFL have a Bo Nix problem that needs to be fixed

The Broncos QB has the tools, the weapons and the trajectory for a massive Year 3, but the morning show argues that lingering biases may keep awards out of reach

BY JOEY FREEBURG

Jul 29, 2026, 9:46 AM

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Watch: Davis Webb's impact will come in different ways than we might think! | Stokley and Evans with Mark Schlereth | 42 seconds

Bo Nix has done everything right. Two playoff appearances. An AFC Championship Game. A franchise resurrected from a decade of irrelevance.

And this season, things are set up for even better things. A receiving corps that now includes Jaylen Waddle. A play caller in Davis Webb who knows his game inside and out. Every ingredient for a monster season is sitting on the counter, measured and ready.

And yet, when the conversation turns to MVP candidacy, the morning show believes there is a ceiling above Nix’s head that has nothing to do with football. Instead, it has everything to do with perception.

On a recent edition of “Stokley and Evans, with Mark Schlereth” on 104.3 The Fan, Mike Evans laid out a case that has been quietly building across Broncos Country for two years. The idea that the people who vote for the league’s most-prestigious individual award carry biases against Nix that his production alone may not be enough to overcome.

Evans started with the broad observation.

“There seems to be some biases that we see exist with voters. Whatever those biases may be, they’re out there,” Evans said.

That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a pattern recognition built on two seasons of watching Nix outperform his draft-class peers in every meaningful category while consistently being ranked below them on national lists, left off dark horse MVP boards and discussed with the kind of qualifying language that other young quarterbacks simply don’t receive.

Evans then connected the dots between the bias and the realistic expectations for this season.

“I’m not saying that Bo will never be an MVP candidate. But I just think there are too many biases for him to overcome from what we’ve seen over the first two years in his career, even in this offseason, to think that he’s all of the sudden gonna be able to make a jump to being a top-three MVP candidate,” Evans said.

Evans isn’t arguing that Nix lacks the talent. He is arguing that the voting body has shown a consistent reluctance to evaluate Nix on the same terms it evaluates his peers, and that kind of institutional inertia doesn’t reverse itself in a single season, no matter how impressive the numbers are.

Evans then identified the root cause of the resistance.

“Clearly, there are people around the football world who had an opinion about Bo leading up to the draft. And they’ve been reluctant to admit that maybe they were wrong,” Evans said.

That is the thread that ties the entire argument together. Nix was not a consensus top-tier prospect coming out of college. A significant portion of the evaluation industry graded him as a mid-round talent. When the Broncos selected him at No. 12 overall and he immediately started winning, those same evaluators were faced with a choice, adjust their assessment or dig in. Two years of evidence suggests a meaningful number of them chose to dig in.

Evans closed with the implication that extends beyond media rankings and into the actual MVP voting process.

“There is no doubt in my mind that there are MVP voters that might feel that way,” Evans said.

The MVP award is not decided by an algorithm. It is decided by human beings with pre-existing opinions, professional reputations and the same psychological resistance to admitting error that exists in every industry. If a voter spent the spring of 2024 publicly dismissing Nix as a first-round pick, acknowledging him as an MVP candidate two years later requires a level of intellectual honesty that not everyone possesses.

None of this means Nix can’t have the best season of his career. The weapons are in place. The coaching staff is aligned. The ankle is reportedly healthy. The trajectory points upward in every measurable way.

But the MVP conversation operates on different rules than the football field, and Evans believes those rules, as currently applied, aren’t working in Bo Nix’s favor. The biases are real. The voting patterns are real. And until the football becomes so undeniable that even the most stubborn holdouts can’t look away, the award may remain just out of reach.

Nix doesn’t need the trophy to validate what Denver already knows. But it would be nice if the people handing it out were paying attention.