Marquez Valdes-Scantling calls Travis Kelce an MVP candidate

Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling says there are good reasons to consider Travis Kelce as a candidate for NFL MVP.

Fans of the Kansas City Chiefs are pretty familiar with keeping up with the NFL’s Most Valuable Player race week after week considering that quarterback Patrick Mahomes is considered the odds-on favorite to win the award, although there’s certainly a lot of football left to play. However, Chiefs wide receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling wants to throw another name out there: tight end Travis Kelce.

Valdes-Scantling has been a valuable member of the Chiefs’ offense himself this season, his first year with the team after spending his first few years with the Green Bay Packers. This being his first season playing alongside Kelce, it’s clear he’s enamored with the historic talent. He’s also not alone given that Kelce has been called perhaps the greatest to ever play his position this year more than ever.

In a recent post online, Valdes-Scantling recently spoke about a couple of earlier Tweets he sent asking if there had ever been a tight end to win the NFL’s MVP award. He explained his reasoning here:

https://twitter.com/The33rdTeamFB/status/1603804900886020098

“We’ve got a pretty good frontrunner over here at quarterback, and I think we’ve got the next best guy in line at tight end. You’ve got a guy who’s in his ninth or tenth season coming in and has 1,000 yards and 10,000 yards in his career and breaking every single record you can think of at tight end. He’s chasing down all these GOATs at tight end. I think we’ve got a good case that Travis can win one. Every week, he’s doing something crazy, putting up yards. Guys are trying to triple-team him and he’s still wide open in the middle of the field.”

Kelce continues to further his own NFL records at this point for sustained production with his seventh consecutive season with 1,000 yards receiving. Kelce first set the record on his own with four, so the fact that he’s so close to doubling that first record is astounding. He’s also only behind Tony Gonzalez, Jason Witten, and Antonio Gates in terms of career yardage, and each of those players played nearly 100 more games (or many more than that) than Kelce.

Kelce is an unlikely candidate to win MVP given the position he plays, but Valdes-Scantling is right to at least ask the question and host the conversation. When one player is so thoroughly dominant year after year, it merits such consideration and Travis Kelce deserves all of that and more in 2022.