Khalil Mack Being Selected Twice as All-Pro Just Another Illustration of Problems with the Voting Process

Khalil Mack was voted as a first team all-pro at both outside linebacker and defensive end. (You can see the full team and voting numbers here). And while this made history–as this headline suggests–it was not a historic all-time season. It was a great season for the young pass rusher, but that he got both designations more points to the flaws of the all-pro voting process.

I wrote about some of the idiocy of the process five years ago, when eight different players were named as second team all-pro at safety, by garnering exactly one vote. My criticism of the voting process has nothing to do with individual choices and whether someone selected Player A over Player B. My issue is with the structure. There are two primary issues: you only vote for one player (or two at certain positions) but the award also goes to second teasers, and there isn’t consistency on assigning positions.

It’s the latter issue that is at the root of the Khalil Mack selection–twice.

Mack got 24 votes at defensive end, and 17 votes at outside linebacker. So out of 50 ballots, he was on 41 of them. Only J.J. Watt (50), Luke Kuechly (49), Aaron Donald (48), and Josh Norman (43) were on a higher percentage of ballots. But they didn’t get two all-pro selections because of the vagaries. Had one more person voted Mack at DE instead of OLB, he would not have been on both first team slots (because it would have dropped behind Thomas Davis). Or, had the one person who voted Thomas Davis at inside linebacker had him as an OLB like everyone else, Mack would also not have been first. And while we celebrate Mack now, it’s not implausible that he could have gotten votes at both positions, but missed out on any award because of voters split their positions.

But I’m glad because maybe … maybe … this will be the impetus to realize that they need to categorize players by position for their voters so there is consistency. And have them vote for 2nd team players (1st team QB, 2nd team QB) also while they were at it, so we don’t have eight guys sharing an award because they got one vote from the local writer.