DeAndre Hopkins is an MVP Candidate: Deal With It

Plenty of football traditionalists shout from the rooftops the notion that the NFL MVP award deserves to go to a quarterback or running back, solely due to the fact that the honor has followed that pattern since 1986 when Lawrence Taylor took home the trophy. This year, Texans WR DeAndre Hopkins is doing on a record-breaking pace and doing things we haven’t seen in quite some time, but the football world is silent.

Open your eyes!

Hopkins has 52 catches for 726 yards and 5 touchdowns — through six games. He’s notched over 145 yards in each of his last three games, already up to 90 targets on the year.

And he’s doing it with Brian Hoyer and Ryan Mallett.

Hoyer and Mallett.

Let that sink in.

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Hopkins, the only legitimate big-play threat who garners the bulk of the attention from every defensive coordinator, is on pace to score 13 touchdowns and haul in 1936 yards on 138 catches.

Imagine the numbers if he had a counterpart to deflect some of the attention!

And before you give me the old “don’t look at the box score and watch some tape, you idiot” line, consider this: Hopkins isn’t just putting up the numbers and allowing bloggers to copy and paste final lines. He’s doing it with his skills — his on-field tools that match any receiver in this league.

Remember what he did to DeAngelo Hall in camp?

Oh, and he was just alright against the Jaguars last week, catching 10 passes for 148 yards. (Sorry, the NFL won’t let us embed their video because… well, yeah. They’re the NFL.)

I don’t care that his team is losing, I don’t care that some of his stats come in garbage time and I certainly don’t care that there’s no other legitimate receiving threat on the roster.

None of those facts deny the MVP-caliber receiver might just make a run at the trophy.

Here’s what Bill O’Brien had to say about his star receiver, c/o Tania Ganguli of ESPN:

"“To be able to line up at F, line up at Y, line up at Z, line up at X, that’s four positions to know,” O’Brien said. “Sometimes… we put him in the backfield. To be able to know four or five positions, it’s very difficult. It’s not easy to do that and it takes a lot of hard work, studying on your own and things like that. I think if we called any play in our offense right now, he would be able to tell what every receiving position has to do on that play. That’s a testament to him and the time he’s put in to learn our offense.”"

Now, I get it. You don’t care about the Texans.

They’re just a boring team from the AFC South that produces mediocre football.

You do you, Hopkins doubters. You do you. Just don’t deny what the former Clemson Tiger is doing to put himself into the Most Valuable Player category as the season rolls on.

And if you still don’t buy in, just ask Hopkins fantasy football owners how they’re feeling.