Has an NFL MVP Ever Not Made the Playoffs?

Winning NFL MVP usually means one thing above all else: your team was really good that season. So it might come as a surprise that, on two separate occasions, a player won the league's top individual honor while his team went home before the playoffs even started.

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The Two Players Who Won MVP but Missed the Postseason

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Johnny Unitas (1967)

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Johnny Unitas won his third career MVP award in 1967 after passing for 3,428 yards and 20 touchdowns while completing 58.5% of his passes — a league-best mark that season. His Baltimore Colts finished an outstanding 11-1-2, a record that would comfortably make the playoffs in almost any other year.

Instead, the Colts missed out entirely. Back in 1967, only division winners qualified for the postseason — there was no wild card. The Colts and the Los Angeles Rams both finished 11-1-2, and the tiebreaker came down to point differential in their two head-to-head meetings that season. The Rams won the tiebreaker, took the division, and the Colts — despite one of the best records in the league — were left out.

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O.J. Simpson (1973)

O.J. Simpson's 1973 MVP season is remembered for one of the most iconic individual accomplishments in NFL history: he became the first running back ever to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season, finishing with 2,003 yards and breaking Jim Brown's previous single-season rushing record.

Despite that historic performance, Simpson's Buffalo Bills finished just 9-5. The AFC East crown went to a 12-2 Miami Dolphins team, and the era's single wild-card spot went to a 10-4 Pittsburgh Steelers squad. Simpson's individual dominance simply wasn't enough to lift a Bills team that couldn't keep pace with two better overall rosters.

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Why This Is So Rare

Only two players have ever pulled off this combination in the entire history of the award, and it's easy to see why. MVP voting has always leaned heavily toward players on winning teams — voters tend to reward players who they see as directly responsible for their team making noise in the standings. A dominant individual season on a team that finishes below .500 or narrowly misses out on a division title just doesn't happen very often, and even when it does, it rarely translates into enough MVP support to actually win the award.

Both Unitas and Simpson are notable exceptions precisely because their individual numbers were so far ahead of the rest of the league that voters couldn't ignore them, even with their teams coming up short in the standings.

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Could It Happen Again Today?

Modern playoff formats make this scenario somewhat less likely than it was in 1967, since the field has expanded significantly and includes multiple wild-card spots per conference. Still, MVP-caliber seasons on teams that ultimately miss the postseason do happen from time to time — recent seasons have seen players finish near the top of MVP odds boards down the stretch while their teams were fighting for a playoff spot, only to fall just short of both. So far, though, no one since 1973 has actually completed the double: winning the award while missing the playoffs entirely.

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