Like it’s been all three years of the league, the road to the league final has been smooth for the Vukovi Belgrade. Perhaps the smoothest of all the years, and that’s maybe why it’s no surprise that, unlike last year, a Vukovi player will win the Player of the Year award — in fact, both awards for offense and defense go to Belgrade.
After a league-wide head coaches vote, including three media votes: CEFL Online, Sportski Žurnal newspaper from Serbia and Football-Austria.com, quarterback and receiver Jordan Green has been named the CEFL Offensive Player of the Year and safety Ivan Nedeljković the Defensive Player of the Year.
Though they won the title last year, it coincided with not a single Belgrade player winning an award, but these two now join Andrej Tasić who won it in 2006 as the league’s finest offensive player. Of the two, Nedeljković’s choice was narrower, as expected, but Green won it in a landslide that came a little bit unexpected.
With the voting process giving everyone a single vote for both categories, with one exception for head coaches that they can’t vote for their own players, Green won with five total votes, three more than the Dukes’ Čaba Juhas. For the defensive side, eight players in total received votes, but all except Nedeljković received just one. The eventual winner received three.
Along with all the other awards, the League MVP throphies will be handed out after the CEFL Bowl on Saturday in Vienna. CEFL’s Excellence Award winners are expected to become official tomorrow.
It’s not all smiles for the Vukovi though, as they still have a final to play Saturday, and they’ll now be going against a CEFL tradition. Not a long tradition of course, but in the first two years, the teams whose players were named best players on offense didn’t fare well in the bowl game. In 2006, when Tasić won it, the Vukovi lost, as did the Budapest Wolves last year, the same year Peter Cseperkalo won.