I'm only just beginning to get involved in this stuff, so I'm far from the ideal person to be asking
What I tend to do is ask myself could Goff win it once every 40 multiverse iterations or Cousins every 80... but that's rarely helpful because my thoughts nearly always say yes
I think if the media loves Cousins then that's a great bet, but they don't
with awards stuff, i'd pay more attention to the gatekeepers of the award than the actual numbers themselves, while baseball is beginning to vote on guys based on hard numbers, you still have people abstaining because they have their own personal rules, like this happening
https://medium.com/@jeremylehrman/th...d-d71b1b925808
some writers just don't care and play by their own rules
In a recent podcast of Bill Simmons where he had Zach Lowe (2 mvp voters) they discussed who they were looking at and how easily they and others would be influenced not by numbers but by narratives. Bill Simmons simply said, if the Lebron/Klutch hype train gets behind Anthony Davis as an MVP candidate, they can easily force it into the media narrative and then all season people are talking and writing about Anthony Davis as MVP and then next thing they vote for him when they were never probably going to look his way either. You should also listen to Simmons when he discusses his own MvP votes this year and he doesn't vote on numbers but things like heart and leadership.
So for this stuff, I think if I were to go about MVP criteria, I'd find the voters and write a script to crawl all their stuff and find positive, neutral and negative mentions of a player. You get enough positive ones and you think that guy can stay healthy then jam it in.
I'd rather invest in hard futures like win/loss o/u or making the playoffs or not, I can do that without needing to read the minds of the voters