When you start Watching MVP candidates this early in the season, weird things happen. You obsess, for example, over win-loss records that really won’t end up meaning much. You pretend you’re picking MVPs for a two-game season, which is preposterous enough to be a good bit of fun. After all, two weeks’ worth of games is all we have to go on at this point, so the Watch can do only so much. No reason not to play around.

There are eight teams in the NFL with 2-0 records, and the Watch thought it would be nice to pick one candidate from each of them for this week’s list. That wasn’t easy, since they don’t all have quarterbacks lighting up the stat sheets and most of them don’t have dominating running backs either and those are the positions players play who tend to win MVP awards.

So while you’ll find some obvious candidates (including the most obvious at the very top), you’ll also find some reaches -- some guys who could never realistically win this award in a million years but deserve recognition for the way they’ve played to help their teams start 2-0. The Watch is circumspect like that. The Watch digs, researches, asks around. The Watch wouldn’t mind living in a world in which a nose tackle could get MVP votes. But the Watch isn’t crazy. Eight of these guys play the MVPosition.