The Comeback Player of the Year award has been a constant source of arguments and controversy as of late. It’s the award that you would think is handed out to the player who got through adversity to come back and play again. Last year the award was given to the guy who simply came off the bench and started some games over a guy whose heart stopped on the field and then was able to come back and play football.
That prompted the award givers to sharpen up the criteria of the award. Now there’s going to be more of an emphasis on overcoming injuries. With that in mind, the super easy thing to do is give the award to Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow.
Burrow tore a ligament in his wrist in Week 11 of last season and was forced to miss the rest of the year. This year he’s come back and arguably been the best quarterback in the league. The Bengals are not good, but he leads the league in passing yards and touchdowns.
I don’t want to in any way demean the work that Burrow put in to overcome his injury. He deserves some recognition for that, but if I’m being completely honest, him winning the award feels cheap and lazy. At the end of the day, we’re talking about one of the best quarterbacks in the league missing a handful of games and then coming back and continuing to be one of the best quarterbacks in the league. It’s like nothing happened at all.
This should be Tim Patrick’s award. In 2021 Patrick was on the rise. He looked like he was going to be one of the league’s next big receivers after putting up 53 catches for 734 yards and five touchdowns.
Then the following August he tore his ACL in early into training camp and had to miss the entire 2022 season. After working to get healthy again and get back into football, Patrick tore his achilles at the start of camp in 2023.
After missing two years of football Patrick finally got back with the Broncos and then got cut. He was a late addition for the Lions and he worked his way onto the field and he has been a big part of why this team is winning the way they are now.
Patrick isn’t leading the league in any stats or anything like that. He has 27 catches for 349 yards and two touchdowns. 18 of those catches have been for first downs by the way.
The big part of this is that he was never supposed to be doing this. Patrick was supposed to be done like most of the guys who miss two years of football are. Sure he might have been able to get back on the field, but he wasn’t supposed to be an important player to a winning team.
But he is and it’s because he fought like hell to get back to that and went through more adversity than any other player that’s in the discussion to win this award. If the criteria is about overcoming injuries and overcoming adversity, there is flat-out nobody that represents that better than Patrick right now.
The good thing is that some see it that way. Bet MGM currently has Patrick with +2500 odds to win the award. Not the best odds at all, but it at least shows he has a chance to be nominated. We’ll see soon enough.