Jan 1st 2009 6:52AM by Michael David Smith (author feed)
Filed under: Falcons, Titans
Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan won the NFL Rookie of the Year award, receiving 44 votes from the 50-member media panel that selects the winner.

Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson came in second, with three votes. He tells the Nashville City Paper (via PFT) that he’s not happy about that.
“He’s a good player, and he played quarterback and did a good job this year,” Johnson said of Ryan. “But the whole thing is bogus, because people are voting for it that are not on the same field as the people who are playing.

“I’m disappointed. I did all I could to win it. I feel I did the best. I feel I did all I could do to win it; it just didn’t come my way.”
Johnson believes that Rookie of the Year voting should be done the same way as Pro Bowl voting: one-third from the coaches, one-third from the players, one-third from the fans. And since Johnson was the only rookie Pro Bowler, he thinks that if the voting were done that way, he would have been Rookie of the Year.

But what he doesn’t seem to have considered is that the Pro Bowl has to choose exactly three running backs and three quarterbacks from each conference. Rookie of the Year voting doesn’t have those constraints. So maybe Ryan was the fourth-best quarterback in his conference, while Johnson was the third-best running back in his conference. That doesn’t mean Johnson was a better rookie than Ryan.

Sorry, Chris. You had a great season. But any way you slice it, Ryan was the Rookie of the Year.