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There are a number of different narratives circulating around the 2016 NFL MVP race, some involving Aaron Rodgers' hot finish to the season, the Cowboys' rookies playing so well and a perceived lack of a clear-cut candidate opening up a window for people to slip in the conversation for the award. The reality is there shouldn't be anyone else talked about for MVP, because there's only one worthy candidate: Matt Ryan.

The Falcons quarterback just completed a season that, if he were playing in a different market or on a different team or had a different last name, he' be celebrated with outlandish graphics every Monday morning.

Instead, Ryan put up a season that belongs with some of the best in recent memory but will somehow go down as a workmanlike effort.

The statistics

There is a lot to unpack when it comes to Ryan's production which, rather surprisingly, has gone mostly unnoticed. This is a legitimately historical season that was good from start to finish -- Ryan didn't come out of the gates hot and cool off. The Falcons jumped out to a hot start, hit a small speed bump midseason and promptly poured it on down the stretch to secure the NFC South title as well as the No. 2 seed in the NFC.

Let's start with the ratings from around the Internet, both traditional and advanced.

QB QB Rating FO DYAR PFF Grade QBR
Matt Ryan 117.1 (1st) 1,918 (1st) 38.3 (2nd) 83.4 (1st)
Tom Brady 104.2 (4th) 1,295 (5th) 47.8 (1st) 83.1 (2nd)
Aaron Rodgers 104.2 (4th) 1,251 (6th) 35.4 (4th) 77.0 (4th)
Matthew Stafford 93.3 (14th) 764 (9th) 15.5 (10th) 70.7 (7th)
Derek Carr 96.7 (9th) 1,044 (7th) 21.0 (6th) 61.8 (16th)

Pro Football Focus has Brady ahead of Ryan in its grading system, but other than that, Ryan holds first place across the board. No one has remotely close to the cumulative ranking of Ryan in terms of the various quarterback ratings.

Ryan's 2016 season currently stands as the fifth-best in terms of quarterback rating in NFL history. He trails only Aaron Rodgers in 2011, Peyton Manning in 2004, Nick Foles in 2013 and Tom Brady in 2007. Yes, one of those things does not belong, but the other three are a trio of the greatest quarterback seasons ever produced. Hopefully no one is trying to argue Ryan is closer to Foles. If you are, please go home.

Ryan's 2016 season stands as the fifth-best in terms of quarterback rating in NFL history. USATSI

Anyway, the rating stats are nice, but the cumulative numbers really tell the whole story here. After all, you can't derive value without producing huge numbers over the entire course of the season.

QB Comp % Yards Yards/Att TD/INT
Matt Ryan 69.9 4944 9.26 38/7
Tom Brady 67.4 3,554 8.23 28/2
Aaron Rodgers 65.7 4,428 7.26 40/7

Brady loses here because he has four less games played thanks to the asinine Deflategate suspension. It stinks that Brady could be dinged for missing four games over reasons that ultimately were out of his control, but the reality is he played four less games than the other quarterbacks in the MVP race.

I believed he deserved MVP consideration at the midway point and still think he's one of the top three candidates, along with Ryan and Rodgers. But the four games matter when Ryan put together a season like the one he lobbed up in 2016.

Those numbers are eye-popping, but the yards per attempt number is borderline shocking. You just don't see 9 yards per attempt over the course of a 16-game season often. Ryan didn't hit 9 yards per attempt every single game, but he was over 7.9, an NFL record.

The reason the number is so high? Ryan was an assassin on the deep ball. According to Pro Football Focus, on he had the second-highest accuracy percentage on balls 20 yards or further down the field (which takes out throwaways, spikes and drops) behind only Sam Bradford.

He didn't throw an interception on a single deep pass this season and his NFL quarterback rating on those deep balls was the highest in over a decade.

Matt Ryan's 136.1 passer rating on deep passes (20+ yards) is the highest in the past 10 years. Only QB not to throw a deep INT this year

— Mike Renner (@PFF_Mike) January 4, 2017

The season-long yards per attempt puts him really rarified air. Let's get conservative -- relative to Ryan's numbers -- with the limits here and look at the number of people since the merger in 1970 who have finished a season completing 65 percent of their passes, thrown for 4,000 yards, thrown 35 touchdowns and averaged more than 9 yards per attempt.

It's a very short list:

QB
 Year Comp % Yards Yards/Att. TD MVP votes
Peyton Manning 2004 67.6 4,557 9.17 49 47
Aaron Rodgers 2011 68.3 4,643 9.25 45 48
Matt Ryan 2016 69.9 4.944 9.26 38 ???

Manning was one vote shy of being a unanimous choice (Michael Vick got a single vote) in 2004, while Rodgers was two votes shy (Drew Brees got a pair) of being unanimous in 2011.

Ryan beat those guys in three out of four categories here. No one is trying to say he's better than Peyton or Rodgers, or even that this year-long snapshot of Ryan's career matches the moment in time when those two quarterbacks were the best players on the planet.

But if his last name is Manning or Rodgers, you're not reading this article because there isn't a debate about whether or not he should win the award.

Ryan didn't throw an interception on a single deep pass this season. USATSI

The team production

This is the biggest problem for Ryan, assuming you add "year-long media coverage" to the competition as well. And, look, we're guilty here too, although we did name Ryan our choice for MVP after the season ended, almost in unanimous fashion. The Falcons have been handling their business all season long.

After a bad 31-24 loss to the Buccaneers at home in Week 1, Atlanta ripped off four wins in a row before narrowly losing in Seattle (26-24, the second of back-to-back road games, the previous one against the Broncos). They would drop a bad game to the Chargers in overtime the next week to fall to 4-3. Atlanta only lost twice more -- on the road against Philadelphia and at home to Kansas City -- and closed out with four wins, two against divisional opponents.

People have not been paying much attention to Atlanta because the South was won a long time ago. Tampa Bay made a nice run at the end of the season, but the Falcons were clearly the best team in the division, finishing with a +134 point differential, a solid 119 points ahead of the Saints, the next-closest team.

Atlanta's point differential was so high because they were the top-scoring team in the NFL by a substantial margin, scoring 33.8 points per game, the only NFL team to finish above 30 points per game on the season.

There were plenty of games, particularly late in the season, when Ryan wasn't throwing the ball late. Ryan finished as the seventh-rated NFC passer in the fourth quarter, but he only threw 99 passes in the fourth quarter all season long. He averaged just over six pass attempts per fourth quarter this season. The Falcons finished with seven wins by double digits. They were too dominant for him to accumulate additional statistics.

Ryan also finished second in the NFL in total passing yards while throwing the 17th most attempts in the NFL. Say that out loud.

It's a weird thing to say, but Ryan's MVP candidacy suffers because the Falcons were too good.

The surrounding cast

People don't often point to Ryan and complain about how he has Julio Jones. But, he does have Julio Jones -- that makes life easier. It would be shortsighted to assume he's just heaving the ball up for his best receiver.

In fact, Ryan set an NFL record with his distribution.

He benefited from the Falcons adding new weapons this offseason, but let's not pretend that Mohamed Sanu, Taylor Gabriel and Austin Hooper were tabbed as groundbreaking additions.

Having Devonta Freeman and Tevin Coleman helps too. But there's nothing about Ryan's cast that's better than what the rest of the MVP candidates are dealing with.

Maybe you give it to Brady, who dealt with Rob Gronkowski going down with fluke injuries, but he had Martellus Bennett waiting in the wings and a slew of weapons that complement the Patriots offense perfectly. Bill Belichick is a nice weapon too, even when the defense isn't dominating.

The Cowboys are loaded on offense and Rodgers, with Jordy Nelson/Davante Adams/Randall Cobb/Jared Cook/Ty Montgomery is probably better off in totality.

Jones finished second in the league with 1,409 receiving yards. USATSI

The narrative

This is the biggest problem for Ryan. Again: his name isn't Manning or Brady or Rodgers, so there will be hesitancy to vote for him.

The Patriots lobbed up a bigger point differential than Atlanta and dealt with Brady being suspended for the first four games of the season. Everyone was waiting for Brady to unleash his vengeance tour (he did, quietly) and there is a legitimate argument the Patriots are underrated at this point. But ultimately the only way to not dock Brady for the four games he missed is a total lack of a worthy candidate.

The Cowboys were the best story in the NFL this season. A pair of rookies, Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott, led Dallas to the No. 1 seed in the division. They were dominant throughout the season and Elliott, even though he had a bad start to the season and skipped Week 17, had a shot at flirting with the all-time rookie record for rushing yards. He led the league in rushing attempts and rushing yardage. Giving the award to Elliott would be an honorary five-man award for the Cowboys offensive line.

Rookies Elliott and Prescott helped lead the Cowboys' resurgence in 2016. USATSI

Rodgers is probably the biggest competition here, and it's bizarre because at about the midway point of the season, the only thing anyone could talk about is "what's wrong with Aaron Rodgers?" That turned out to be laughable -- Rodgers is now destroying everything in his path and has been nuclear for the last 10 games. Jordy Nelson getting healthy and Davante Adams emerging coincided with Rodgers bounce back, but it's obvious he's had laser-like focus over the last few months. The Packers are a terrifying matchup in the playoffs and they're not there without Rodgers. His bold "we're running the table" proclamation turned out to be true and is a delightful storyline, but it shouldn't outweigh a season's worth of production.

Derek Carr won't win the award either, but he did put together a wonderful season and, you could also argue, eclipsed the Falcons in terms of publicity for various stretches of the season.

That's the biggest problem for Ryan's MVP candidacy. During each portion of the season, the Falcons were overshadowed by a bigger story. The Cowboys' hot start, Brady's return, the magic of the Raiders, Matthew Stafford's emergence in Detroit and Rodgers' hot stretch to close the season all line up poorly for coverage of Atlanta's 11-win season.

The reality is the Falcons answered all the questions while plugging along in dominant fashion throughout the entire season.

Now there's only one question left: Should Matt Ryan be MVP? The answer should be a resounding yes.