Choosing a most valuable player in the National Football League is, in one respect, far easier than picking one in Major League Baseball. In football, you can throw out just about everyone who isn’t a passer or a runner. Over the last 20 years, only one defensive player – the Giants’ Lawrence Taylor in 1986 – has won the big one, the Associated Press MVP, which is regarded by the NFL as the “official” award, and only one receiver, Jerry Rice, has been named anybody else’s MVP (Rice won the Sporting News’s award in 1987 and 1990).

The reason is simple: Runners and passers get the stats. Football coaches and writers can gas all day on the importance of defense and intangibles, but when it comes to awarding trophies, they’re going to give them to the guys with the numbers.

Not that the guys with the numbers don’t deserve the trophies. In baseball, the best hitter in the lineup still bats as just one of nine. In football, you can use your best guys as often as you want. The best defensive player on the field can often be neutralized by either double teaming him or running or throwing the ball to another side of the field, but there’s nothing you can do to keep a quarterback from throwing the ball as often as he likes, or to keep the ball out of the hands of the other team’s best runner. That’s precisely why the best backs are called “impact” players.

Deciding whether the MVP is going to be a runner or passer is the easy part, but beyond that, the debate invariably gets sidetracked into a series of non-issues in which logic and objectivity are the first casualties.

First of all, there’s the eternal question over whether running or passing is the key to winning in football. This shouldn’t be a subject for debate: The pro game is almost always decided by the team with the best passing attack. This year, the team with the best passing attack is, of course, the Indianapolis Colts, and Peyton Manning, as late as a few weeks ago, was the favorite to join Brett Favre as the only players to win three MVPs.

Now, primarily because his team has come on strong in the second half, it looks like the award will go to Seattle’s Shaun Alexander, by consensus the best running back in the league. Also in the running is Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer, who leads the league in touchdown passes and ranks in the top three in just about every major statistic, but is still a year or two away from the recognition he deserves.

Alexander is as good a football player as Manning, which is to say he does what he does as well as Manning. But what Manning does is more important than what Alexander does. This is because most NFL teams run the ball at comparable levels of efficiency. The cumulative average of all running backs since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970 is 4.2 yards per carry, and it doesn’t seem to matter much if a team finishes above or below that average. As we enter the final week of the season, the Colts and Seahawks have the best records in the league at 13-2. Seattle is 0.6 above the league norm, averaging 4.8 yards per rush, while the Colts are 0.5 below it at 3.7.

Most NFL teams, though, do not pass the ball at anywhere near the same level of efficiency. This year, when Manning throws the ball, the Colts average 8.3 yards per attempt (second in the league to Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger). David Carr, quarterback for the 2-13 Houston Texans, averages 5.98 yards per throw. There’s simply no way Houston or any other team is going to win with a passing game that bad, no matter how well they run the ball. (Houston runs for 4.2 yards a try, about exactly the league norm and considerably better than the Colts.)

Jumble the numbers any way you want – passing beats running almost every time. Manning is the best passer in football, so if they want to give the trophy to him, no one should go to the barricades to argue.

This year, though, a very strong case can be made for a couple of runners. Alexander doesn’t just lead the league in rushing, he also has the best per try, 5.2 yards, of any runner with more than 1,000 yards. Alexander’s performance is so much better than the typical NFL running back’s that it could be argued there is almost no one Seattle could replace him with and continue to win.

The same argument, though, could be made for the Giants’ Tiki Barber – in fact, the numbers indicate that Barber has not only performed as well as Alexander, but that he is more valuable to his team. Alexander has outscored Barber 26 touchdowns to eight, but touchdowns can be a misleading stat when applied to individual players. When Seattle gets inside the five-yard line, they give the ball to Alexander; when the Giants get inside the five, they choose to either pass to tight end Jeremy Shockey or give the ball to Brandon Jacobs, who has carried just 35 times but scored six touchdowns.

Alexander’s basic stats are slightly better than Barber’s – 5.2 yards to rush to 5.0 for Tiki – and he has rushed for 150 more yards, 1,807 to 1,657. But these advantages are more than countered by Barber’s superiority as a receiver; he has caught 48 passes for 470 yards to Alexander’s 15 catches and 78 yards.

Maybe most important, Alexander is responsible for 1,885 of his team’s 5,670 total yards of offense (33%), while Barber is responsible for 2,127 of the Giants’ 5,385 yards (39%). Ultimately, Barber won’t win the award because his team has lost three more games than Alexander’s, but Tiki has been both the better all-around performer and the more valuable one to his team.

There’s one player, however, who deserves consideration over Manning, Alexander, and Barber.

The irony of Tom Brady’s career is that when New England was winning Super Bowls and Brady wasn’t topping any statistical lists, the football press tended to overrate him. Now that the Patriots have slipped a bit and Brady is having the best season of his career, he’s been grossly overlooked.

Brady’s stats, both in quantity and quality, are comparable to Manning’s, and he’s compiled them with far less support. With one game to go, Brady is the NFL’s only quarterback with more than 4,000 yards through the air (4,073), and ranks fourth in the league in yards per attempt at 7.8 despite no Pro-Bowl caliber receivers to throw to (no Patriot wideout averages more than 12.6 yards a catch, about what you’d expect from a solid tight end) and no great runner to take the heat off him (the Pats are 29th in yards rushing and average just over 3.5 per crack).

Yet despite all the handicaps – which include the loss of his great offensive coordinator, Charlie Weis – Brady has been the most prolific and nearly the most efficient quarterback in the league. More than any other player in the NFL, he is clearly the reason his team is in the playoffs.

No player, viewed from the proper context, has been better than Tom Brady this season, and no player has meant more to his team’s success. That’s as perfect a definition for MVP as we’re likely to find.

Mr. Barra is the author, most recently, of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”