The Real Comeback Player of the Year? It's Brunell.

Now that the regular season has ended, it's time for the NFL to hand out its yearly awards. So far, I can't say I disagree with the bulk of the winners. Shaun Alexander earned the MVP this year by leading the league in rushing and setting the all-time record for TDs in a season. You really can't argue with that. The same is the case for Offensive Rookie of the Year Cadillac Williams, who's already being considered as one of the elite backs in the league. If you do that as a rookie, you're pretty good. The likely winner for Coach of the Year, the Colts' Tony Dungy, also seems like a no-brainer, as he turned an offensive powerhouse on the cusp of greatness into a nearly unbeatable complete team.

I do, however, take issue with this year's recipients of the vaguely-defined Comeback Player of the Year Award, which ended up as a tie between Panthers WR Steve Smith and Patriots LB Tedy Bruschi. Both of these players won the award on the merits of "coming back" to play well after months of being declared medically ineligible. The problem is, both of these guys were star players before they got hurt, and the fact that they continued to be good players after they got healthy doesn't seem all that shocking to me. (Okay, so the fact that Bruschi even got back to football playing health after suffering a stroke is pretty impressive. But, if we're taking his health as a given, why is it such a big deal that he's still a good player?)

The Comeback Award needs to adhere to some sort of standard criteria from year to year, something more concrete than simply a player who has met some definition of the word comeback. Otherwise, the debate becomes more about what the award should mean each year, rather than about which player deserves it most. What's to stop sportswriters next year from handing it out to a wide receiver who runs really good curl routes?

I argue that the Comeback Player of the Year should always be a guy who played like crap the previous year, and all of a sudden starts doing awesome. And who met this criteria in 2005 better than Redskins quarterback Mark Brunell? No other player who sucked in 2004 rocked as much as Brunell in 2005, and no other good player in 2005 blew as hard as Brunell in 2004.