There’s an easy way to solve the NFL’s dumb MVP debate. Call it the Saquon Barkley Trophy.

There are three big problems with the NFL’s MVP award.

1) It isn’t the NFL’s MVP award. It’s the Associated Press’ MVP Award. Has been since the 1950s. Except for the years when it was the AP’s Most Outstanding Player Award. And also that one year when it was the AP’s Player of the Year Award.

2) It actually kind of is the NFL’s MVP Award, since the AP announces the award at the league’s officially sanctioned NFL Honors night. So even if the MVP isn’t an official NFL award, it would seem to qualify as an official NFL honor. Right?

3) It won’t matter whose award it is if it collapses into itself and becomes a black hole of meaninglessness.

At the moment, the NFL and the AP are flying down the autobahn toward Exit No. 3, as exhibited by the ongoing debate about Saquon Barkley’s MVP candidacy. It isn’t their fault, necessarily. Once upon a time, it wasn’t naïve to think that the term MVP would always mean what it had always meant, and that societies present and future would not struggle so mightily to engage in good-faith conversation about which individual athletic performances qualified as the best or preeminent or most outstanding or most impressive within a given season.

Alas, it was a simpler, less stupid time. Now, thanks to the elimination of the technological checks and balances that existed for both the viral nature of groupthink and the totalitarian impulses of pedants, all of us are living in a thought experiment we can’t escape. In the attention-seeking economy, it isn’t enough to argue about whether or not Barkley is the NFL’s MVP. The real argument is whether or not the argument can even be had.

The circumstances are best illustrated by an argument that was recently barfed up by the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Ben Baldwin, an NFL analytics wonk, submitted what he seemed to believe was an airtight case against Barkley’s legitimacy as an MVP candidate. Pointing to the struggles endured by the Dolphins and 49ers when their respective starting quarterbacks went down with injuries, Baldwin wondered whether anybody believed the Eagles would suffer an equivalent drop-off without Barkley in their backfield.

“Out of sheer curiosity,” Baldwin wrote, “do the Saquon MVP people truly, actually believe that if the Eagles lost Saquon, their offense would be more damaged than the Dolphins offense was when Tua went down or the 49ers offense was when Purdy went down?”

Now, I mean no disrespect to Tua Tagovailoa or Brock Purdy, at least one of whom is a perfectly adequate NFL quarterback that any team would be thrilled to have as its primary backup. Nor is this a knock on Baldwin. In fact, his premise is sound. The problem lies in his conclusion. What he thinks is an argument against Barkley’s legitimacy as an MVP candidate is actually an argument against the legitimacy of the MVP award itself. After all, if an all-time great running back in the midst of an all-time great season for a potentially all-time great team is less deserving of an honor than two middle-of-the-road-quarterbacks in the midst of good-but-not-great seasons for two middle-of-the-road teams, then where exactly is the honor? If Tua Tagovailoa and Brock Purdy are better candidates for an award than Saquon Barkley, then what’s the point of the award?

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It’s a question on which the NFL and AP would be wise to marinate. There’s something inherently illogical about an award that portends to be the NFL’s highest individual honor while also favoring a quarterback who ranks outside the NFL’s top 10 in every major statistical category over a running back who is threatening the league’s single-season rushing record.

Make no mistake: What Barkley is doing this season is historic. Not since the muck-and-grind, when-men-were-men glory days of the NFL has a running back had as big of an impact on his team’s Super Bowl chances. Barkley’s 1,499 rushing yards are the most through 12 games since 2009, when the NFL’s wide-open passing era was still in its infancy. The next-closest running back in the last 15 seasons is Adrian Peterson, who was 53 yards behind in 2012, when he became the last non-quarterback to be named AP MVP.

Of course, anybody who has watched these Eagles understands that Barkley’s impact has exceeded even his gaudy raw totals. Barkley isn’t just a good running back behind a great line on a great team. He is doing things nobody else would be doing in the same situations. He leads the league in rushing yards over expected, averaging 1.87 per attempt according to NFL Next Gen Stats. His 25-yard touchdown run against the Ravens in the fourth quarter on Sunday was one of at least four times he almost single-handedly struck the decisive blow in a game. The raw numbers do not show you the extent to which he has created offense on his own, from his violent first and last steps to his recognition of running lanes to his secondary burst to his performance as a pass protector. His has been as fine of a football season as you will see, regardless of position.

To be clear, nobody is arguing that Purdy should be MVP. Nor will any serious person make that case for Tagovailoa, whose numbers are much better than Purdy’s but still far worse than the three quarterbacks who actually deserve consideration alongside Barkley (Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow). The problem is that serious-minded people can make the case that Purdy, while not the most valuable player, is a more valuable player than Barkley. There is only one serious-minded conclusion. If we’re to believe that the MVP is the NFL’s highest individual honor, then the criteria for it must be something other than the literal definition of “value.” The goal is to honor the Maseratis, not the Subaru Outbacks.

I’ll point you to something the AP’s global sports editor, Ricardo Zuniga, said in 2022 when announcing an update to the organization’s voting system.

“The essence of the AP NFL awards remains the same — to recognize the top performers of the season,” he said.

Maybe Barkley isn’t this year’s Best in Show. Maybe it is Allen, or Jackson, or Burrow, all of whom have compelling cases. Most years, you aren’t going to find a running back who has had that level of impact and warrants a spot in the conversation. This is not most years.

Maybe the answer is to change the name of the award, the way the AP did way back when. Save us from our semantic overlords. Call it the Most Outstanding Player. Call it the Player of the Year. Or just cut to the chase and henceforth call it the Saquon Barkley Trophy.