Byron Murphy II is suddenly part of the Jeremiah Love conversation for 2026 Defensive Player of the Year votes after Sports Illustrated put him among three Seattle Seahawks who could draw attention. That is a useful shift for a defensive tackle who was described as a year closer to his prime.
The case starts with the number that usually decides this award: eight Defensive Player of the Year winners in the last 30 years reached at least eleven sacks. Murphy was also described as effectively the nose tackle last year, which makes the path narrower than it looks on paper.
Leonard Williams and Murphy II
Murphy nearly matched Leonard Williams as a pass rusher last year, even though Williams is the more well-known player in the trenches for the Seahawks for the moment. That split matters because it shows Murphy is already operating near the top of the same front without needing a full-time spotlight.
He was also the tip of the spear of the league’s best run defense last year. That kind of role rarely turns into award noise by itself, but it gives him a cleaner route to votes than a box-score-only profile would.
Eight winners, eleven sacks
The award history is the hard part. Defensive tackle winners can get there, but the recent standard is steep, and the article points to at least eleven sacks as the bar that has shown up in most recent cases.
Warren Sapp won in 1999 and Dana Stubblefield won in 1997, while Aaron Donald and J.J. Watt sit in the group of past winners that define the modern edge-rusher conversation. The message is simple: interior linemen can break through, but they usually have to produce like rare outliers.
Luke Kuechly in 2013
The linebacker path is even thinner. Luke Kuechly last won the award in 2013, and Brian Urlacher did it in 2005, with Ray Lewis and Derrick Brooks representing the earlier golden age in the early 00s.
That history leaves the Seahawks with a strange balance: a true unit that is well-rounded and deep, yet not built around one obvious star. Myles Garrett was the obvious pick last year, and Murphy now sits in a different lane, one where he can get some votes in 2026 without needing the whole defense to change shape around him.
Jeremiah Love is the frame here, but the real test is colder and more specific: can Murphy produce the sack total that usually buys a defensive tackle a seat in the award discussion? If he does, the votes follow; if he does not, the profile probably stays where it is now.
