NFL Awards voting is now big business with big implications. And with only 50 votes to go around, each ballot carries significant weight to it. That’s what makes what happened to the AP NFL Awards ballot of Tony Dungy all the more remarkable.
As it turns out, there was a discrepancy with this year’s AP NFL Awards voting. At the bottom of their voting results is this paragraph. “This story has been corrected to remove an invalid ballot that was inadvertently included in the tabulation. The AP has adjusted its point totals to reflect 49 voters instead of 50. This correction does not impact the winners or the list of finalists distributed by AP.”
So what happened that would cause the removal of one of the 50 ballots?
Mike Florio at Pro Football Talk discovered the discrepancy and found a very odd explanation. As it turns out, the ballot of current NBC Sports analyst and former Super Bowl winning coach Tony Dungy was actually replaced by a duplicate from Diantee Lee of The Ringer. In the end, Dungy’s award ballot was never counted.
During the tabulation of the 50 ballots, the ballot submitted by Diantee Lee of TheRinger.com was counted twice, with the second ballot replacing the ballot assigned to Hall of Fame head coach and Football Night in America analyst Tony Dungy. After the AP noticed the error (which explains why Lee’s and Dungy’s ballots as released by the AP were identical), Dungy’s ballot was removed.
Dungy noticed the mistake because the ballots as disclosed by the AP incorrectly showed that he voted for Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson for MVP. The AP then told him a couple of weeks later that it did not use his ballot at all.
Could you imagine what would have happened if Lamar Jackson would have beaten out Josh Allen by one vote this year? It would have been mass chaos unlike anything we have ever seen in professional sports awards. This season the MVP voting was heavily scrutinized and some award voters like Dianna Russini were caught off guard that their votes were made public. And now we come to find out that one of the award ballots was totally misplaced and counted wrongly. Yikes!
It’s not like these awards are just meant for resume builders for Hall of Fame candidacies or for bragging rights. There are tons of contract escalators and bonuses on the line and now not to mention an untold amount of dollars wagered by sports bettors around these awards. Thankfully it didn’t seem to have a material effect on the award winners this year, which is a huge sigh of relief for the Associated Press and for everyone in the football world.