2017 Chiefs predictions: Who will be the defensive MVP?

With so many star players on the Chiefs defense, who did our staff writers think would stand out in 2017 to take the team’s defensive MVP?

Even the casual NFL fan can rattle off a list of Kansas City Chiefs defenders. Give them another year of watching the NFL and a couple more names are likely to break through. The Chiefs have become very successful over the last four years under Andy Reid and much of that success is because of the elite level defense put together by the front office, both in retaining the right players but also in replacing them with key figures over time.

The Chiefs employ several Pro Bowlers on the defense, which makes it a big tough to pick a defensive MVP for many of our staff writers. In fact, the majority of them felt good about going a bit more under-the-radar with this pick. It’s a surprise to see some of the players and some others left out (including Derrick Johnson and Eric Berry). We swear we wrote all of these before the season started, so maybe we all intuited something about Berry’s future. However, the work he did on Rob Gronkowski in Week 1 makes me think we should have honored him anyway. He’s a helluva player.

Moving on, here are our staff writers predictions for the defensive MVP of the Kansas City Chiefs in 2017